The holidays can be a fun time in SecondLife with so many areas being so nicely decorated, but you should make sure your avatar is ready for the holidays as well.

I’m afraid I missed the holiday hair at Gurl 6 (SLURL), but they have a great sale through the month of December so get on down there and pick up some great hair styles at some really good prices.

Of course what’s the use of having a great hair style without some new clothes? Cherry Cheevers over at DollyRock (SLURL) has brought out some adorable new outfits lately and they even have a Christmas Cutie that may just be your must have holiday outfit.

While you’re in SecondLife you should check the Lost & Found folder in your inventory. You may find some things there that you thought were gone for good.

I’ll see about getting my tees back on sale in case you missed last year’s holiday tees. I may even bring out a new tee or two to add to your collection so watch this space for more news.

Peng and I want to join basement cat in…

There are a ton of events going on in SecondLife today that I’ll have to check out now that Peng showed me how to get on SL from Intrepid. And Gurl 6 has some free hair for the occasion, in addition to the daily special, so get out there and celebrate like it’s 2008! Just don’t take any plastic (or wooden) candy apples.

A little over a week ago I posted about a security update from SecondLife that made it harder for hackers to access your inventory and Linden Dollar balance. It turns out that they have another oopsie that was pushed out Monday evening.

If you tried to log into SecondLife since Monday evening you already know that you need to get the new viewer to log in, whether you use the officially released viewer or the release candidate viewer. You now need version 1.20.17 of the viewer or release candidate five of viewer version 1.21 to be able to log in.

Exactly what wet wrong this time? This is what they said on the SL Grid Status Report blog:

We recently updated the Second Life server and viewers to enhance the communications code. All transfer operations are now restricted to files that the user has expressly chosen, and specific directories that the viewer uses for transferring data. For the safety of all Second Life users, we are releasing this updated viewer to all Residents.

Potential vulnerabilities had been identified in those message communications directed at a Second Life viewer over the previous protocol. By taking advantage of this vulnerability, while extremely difficult technically, a malicious user could potentially use the viewer to access files on the victim’s computer. We currently have no evidence of this vulnerability ever being exploited.

I apologize for not posting this sooner but I was away from my computer for most of yesterday. It works out well, though, because yesterday they notified the readers of the grid status blog that there is currently problems rezzing objects, and they’re still working on getting the problem fixed. So if you try to rez something and can’t, they already know about the problem and they’re on the case.

The JIRA Public Issues Tracker was offline this morning, but they’ve managed to get it back online so you can once again report bugs in SecondLife and see the bugs others have reported.

While you’re in SecondLife make sure you stop by DollyRock and pick up a set of their very cool Halloween Stockings as well as their Halloween Freebie. The freebie is a very cute, and very sexy, Halloween outfit, complete with a hat. The hat does come with some straight black hair, but if the hair doesn’t work for your avatar (it doesn’t for me) at least you’ll get a sexy outfit to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve in.

Some time back SecondLife decided they would peel the grid status messages (updates, rolling restarts, login issues, etc.) off of their main blog an put them on a stats blog under the Second Life Grid domain. While I haven’t been on SL nearly as much as I used to be, I totally missed the fact that there was a “potential security issue” that could have left malicious users able to act as if they were you, right down to stealing your Linden dollars.

I kind of have to laugh at the way the Lindens described the potential for stealing your Linden dollars.

In the case of L$ transactions, this action would be visible to you: if this were to occur, the viewer would report the transaction after it occurred in the normal blue dialog box. Also, you are always able to inspect the transaction log to see recent transactions. This would allow you to notice and report these actions for violating the Second Life Terms of Service.

This type of malicious action would constitute a violation of the Terms of Service, and would be against the law in some locations. At this time we have no evidence that this vulnerability was ever exploited.

Wow, both a violation of the ToS and against the law? I bet those meal old malicious users didn’t even think that may be the case.

Anywho, If you haven’t fired up SecondLife since Friday you may not be aware that you’re strongly advised, although not required for some odd reason, to download new viewers, whether you’re running the main viewer (version1.20.15, released 24 July) or the Release Candidate Viewer (1.21 RC2, and please don’t get me started on beta software being called RC’s).

You can get more on the SecondLife Grid Status blog. Personally I think this is just one more reason why I’m looking at the open source Meerkat viewer, although downloads are currently disabled due to SL’s security issue. I saw about the security issue on the Meerkat site, so big thanks to them for letting me know abut it.

If you’ve been in SecondLife when the lights go down you know what I mean. Sometimes they’re nice and subtle, but other times they’re so fricking bright that they light up an entire room. The problem is that they can mess up a sim owner’s carefully designed lighting, as if you forced the sun to noon when the sim owner recommends that you force the sun to midnight to enjoy the full effect.

Our hero Torley Linden has ridden to the rescue once again, telling us about a new setting in the new 1.21 Release Candidate will let you completely disable facelights, as well as “particle-emitting attachments.”

Thank you, Torley!

/me hopes Torley’s wife won’t mind my walking up and placing a big, wet kiss on his avatar.

I love Torley Linden’s Second Life Tip of the Week videos, but the devs are working on the site so he can’t post to it yet. Here’s Torley’s explanation of why it’s on his blog rather than on the SL blog.

If you’re wondering why this is on my personal blog instead of the official Second Life Blog and why you haven’t seen the KB Article of the Week lately either, it’s because Linden Lab is undergoing changes in communication policy and preparing for future improvements.

As much as that doesn’t seem to make sense, I can’t go into details now, and I would’ve let you know earlier were it not for events beyond my control. Please pardon me, I promise to share more if/when I can do so. In the meantime, if you have ideas for how I can better help you by making video tutorials broadly visible in places I’ve missed, let me know!

Awww! But this week’s video tip is a cool one, so I wanted to make sure you guys knew about it. This week’s video tip is about Custom Collision Sounds in SecondLife. That’s so cool I’m going to have to play with it one day.

In case you missed last week’s tip on reporting abuse, you should definitely check it out. I meant to blog it but RL got in the way.

Don’t forget, if you miss any of Torley’s tip videos you can see them again in the SL wiki, and you can always download high quality versions of the tips so you can always have them on your hard drive for the next time you want to refer to them.

Torley Linden has made over 600 textures, not to be confused with his amazing Windlight settings, that people have long enjoyed in building within SecondLife. Now you can create things to be uploaded into SecondLife using his textures. Torley has created a ZIP file will all of his textures to date that you can download and use until you’re heart’s content. He does have one caveat:

… you can use them freely on commercial products & services, just don’t sell them as-is (that’s foolish, because I’m giving them away for free right here).

Now if I only had enough RAM to use Globus to check out the textures a little more quickly.

For as long as I (or Peng) can remember the SecondLife Forums have been off limits to us since we not only don’t pay monthly fees (due to a combination of available funds and fairly recent bugginess, plus the fact that I’m hardly on it anymore), but I was reading a post on the SL Blog from Catherine Linden about new forum discussion threads and clicked on a link to the forums, expecting the usual “I don’t recognize you. Please log in.” response. Instead I found I was looking at a page on their forums! Wow!

I did some poking around in their Linux Client Testers section to see what was going on there and I saw some nice comments about the Cool Second Life Viewer. I had seen something about it before but a quick glance didn’t show me any “have to use” features so I hadn’t gotten it yet, but after today I may have to take it for a spin the next time I pop in to check messages and to see what the September hair from Gurl 6 is. Although looking around Six Kennedy’s blog again I think I’m going to have to subscribe to her feed. She has some pretty nice specials that I’ll want to be able to catch.

Update 1:30pm Tuesday, 26 August: I’ve had to close comments for this post since it also has become a spam magnet latly. I’ll try to open comments again in a few weeks. I’d really hate to have to disable comments accross my entire blog due to the spammers.

[Added a link to another video from Torley. - Nanci]

It took LindenLabs 14 release clients (although many of them were misnamed betas IMO) but SecondLife version 1.20 came out last week. I was waiting to blog it until I could confirm that VWR-2778 (the annoying invisible skirt bug) is truly fixed, and when I fired it up I had to rebake my textures (Ctrl+Alt+R) and sure enough, it seems that skirts are finally showing up.

They’re calling 112 bugs as being fixed in this new version, plus we finally have the ability to use different skins, although I’m still trying to find out how to add skins to the ones available. I miss my Retro skin.

There are more things available in SecondLife 1.20, such as the appearance of “cloud people”, and there’s a handy wiki page to discover ten things you’ll want to check out in the new viewer.

This new viewer is completely optional, but I strongly recommend any female in SecondLife to upgrade to this new version, even if only for the fix to the system skirt issue that has been bugging the daylights out of many of us since last October.

While you’re updating your SecondLife don’t forget to check out Torley Linden’s seventh set of QuickTip videos. I definitely want to check out the Customized Speech Gestures, Lip Syncing (while talking, not singing, naturally), sitting tricks and a whole lot more. YAYZERAMA, indeed!

Updated 28 July 9:12am: Woops! I knew I had a video from Torley that specifically addressed this new release but I had it flagged wrong so it didn’t come up when I was looking at the tings I wanted to blog. It’s Torley’s Video Tip of the Week #43 – What’s new in SecondLife 1.20! Sorry about that.

SecondLife has released the twelfth Release Candidate for version 1.20 of their viewer software, and while I’d love to be able to simply point out the good things in this RC instead I’m going to have to take them to task for changing what is the pretty universal stages of software design and testing. I’ve spoken  to Peng about it and he’s pretty dumsquizzled that they’re calling what are clearly beta versions as “Release Candidates.” I did some searching on my own and found two examples of how software testing should go.

I know that Wikipedia isn’t as reliable a source as the Encyclopedia Britannica was, but from checking out other sites I suspect they’re pretty on target, even if some citations are needed.

Before shipping the final version of software, alpha and beta testing are often done additionally:

• Alpha testing is simulated or actual operational testing by potential users/customers or an independent test team at the developers’ site. Alpha testing is often employed for off-the-shelf software as a form of internal acceptance testing, before the software goes to beta testing
• Beta testing comes after alpha testing. Versions of the software, known as beta versions, are released to a limited audience outside of the programming team. The software is released to groups of people so that further testing can ensure the product has few faults or bugs. Sometimes, beta versions are made available to the open public to increase the feedback field to a maximal number of future users.

And yes, a Release Candidate should be software that the devs think may just be ready for prime time and need testers to make sure there are no major bugs that absolutely have to be fixed before release.

Even MySQL, a software developer that’s been around since the mid-90’s agrees with these definitions.

Alpha Release

Alpha is for preview purposes only.

Beta release

Beta releases are appropriate for use with new development. Within beta releases, the features and compatibility should remain consistent. However beta releases may contain numerous and major unaddressed bugs.

Release Candidate (aka Gamma) release

Release Candidate binaries, also known as Gamma releases, are believed stable, having passed all of MySQL’s internal testing, and with all known fatal runtime bugs fixed. However this release has not been in widespread use long enough to know for sure that all bugs have been identified.

Generally Available (aka Production) release

Generally Available (GA), also know as Production releases, are stable, having successfully passed through all earlier release stages and believed to be reliable, free of serious bugs, and suitable for use in production systems

Needless to say when SecondLife announced yet another in a series of Release Candidates I had to ask them what was going on.

TWELVE Release candidates? How about releasing a viewer and working on Dazzle or something for the next version. In all honesty, if it takes you twelve times to get a viewer out of beta stage I doubt you’re really trying at all.

Yes, I’m glad to be able to wear a non-prim skirt again. Yes, I like what I’m seeing, but come on. Twelve RCs is pretty ridiculous.

As I suspected some over grown kid had to flame me.

@8: It’s rather obvious you never developed software (and no, 10 lines of Basic don’t count).

Luckily someone injected a little more reason to my complaint.

TWELVE release candidates?!

Look, I’m sure there are quite a few very competent code monkeys over there in Linden land, but to anyone who has ever worked with a team of developers this screams out “Project Mismanagement”.

A “Release Candidate” is suppose to be considered “Ready for Release” baring any unforeseen major issues. This client should NEVER have come out of beta.

If the project manager can’t tell the difference between beta and RC then perhaps the Lindens need to start scouting for a new team leader.

That being said, I have yet to see any performance or usability improvements over the current gold client. This is like going from XP to Vista – it “looks” prettier, but it performs worse.

I hate to be all negative like this – I’ve been on SL a LONG time and I truly WANT to enjoy it. But honestly, this new client feels like you guys are treading water – that you’ve already hit some sort of ceiling and your users have no “wiz bang neato” features to look forward to.

How about throwing your user base a bone – open up the vertical area to 4096m for building, increase the outdated sim prim limit, allow users to create prims larger than 10m, allow greater flexibility in altering avatar meshes. These are things that will IMPROVE the user experience instead of just parading an endless stream of RC’s that are actually Beta’s in disguise.

Ramzi Linden gave us an official response.

@8, @11- Yes there has been a lot of 1.20 Release Candidates, huh!

The (technical language) reason is that we rebranched this candidate from the code-trunk at RC7, which means it was based on a somewhat different/improved codebase than RC0. (You may recall it was 1.20.7 that introduced a very large slew of new fixes, and even some new features.. we usually don’t do this.) Our intention in this unusual move was to utilize the benefits of some major stability work that hadn’t been ready from RC0 to RC6.

The faster answer is: We were not satisfied with the stability of RC0 – RC6, so we redoubled our efforts in a second extended cycle. Hence the reason for twice as long. As JetZep and Catten said, it means we had time to do many more bugfixes. I hope the result is a better version 1.20, which everybody wants!

In other words RC7 wasn’t even an RC, but a new branch of betas. I just wish they had called it what it was.

Now if only we could know that a final release was coming soon, but with twelve release candidates I’ve learned to never trust a SecondLife RC as a real RC. I’m thinking of going back to the official release rather than downloading yet another so called Release Candidate, especially since I have to apply Torley’s Windlight settings as well as a different skin to get rid of ugly the Dazzle Blue. And they wonder why their users still aren’t completely thrilled with having to spend money on monthly subscriptions, let alone tier fees.