Thursday March 21st will see an all-day concert staged at the SL Buddy Walk 2013, which I previewed recently.
The live concert kicks-off at 14:00 SLT to mark World Down Syndrome Day, although there will be music from DJs throughout the morning and leading up to the concert itself, kicking off at 10:00 SLT.
All proceeds made during the concert via the donation boxes on and around the spectacular stage will go directly to the National Down Syndrome Society (NDSS).
Concert Schedule
14:00: Tom 2.0
15:00: CQ – Colorful Quiet
16:00: Maximillion Kleene
17:00: The Follow
18:00: Porter Paquot
19:00: Amforte Clarity
20:00: Colt Shostakovich
21:00: Noma Falta
22:00: Edward Kyomoon
Early morning: the 2013 SL Buddy Walk dance floors and stage beyond. The concert starts at 14:00 SLT on Thursday March 21st.
DJs for the Rest of the Event
The current line-up of DJs and music entertainment for the rest of the event comprises (please check with the SL Buddy Walk blog for updates):
Thursday, March 21st:
10:00 – midday: Meca4life
Midday – 14:00: Lette4life27
Friday, March 22nd:
16:00 – 18:00: Willybenz
18:00 – 20:00: Jennifer Lunz
20:00 – 21:00: Kaleb Avedon
Saturday, March 23rd:
14:00 – 16:00: Mystic Glenwalker
18:00 – 20:00: Dalliah Love
20:00 – 21:00: Michy Hendisson singing live
Tuesday, March 26th:
16:00 – 17:00: Kakeb Avedon
Sunday March 31st:
13:00 – 15:00:Nimeral Bearsfeet
15:00 – 17:00: Kaleb Avedon
Also remember that the SL Buddy Walk fair continues through until March 31st, featuring a host of SL designers and creators, with all donates make via the donation boxes in the fair plazas going directly to the NDSS, as do the proceeds of sales from the special vendors creators have on display, with some creators donating up to 100% of all proceeds from their sales – look for the in-store signs.
Update: Neva River is currently closed to public access.
I covered Neva River very briefly last year. The region is Neva Crystall’s private home, and every so often she will remodel it and then open it to the public for a couple of weeks, so that everyone can enjoy her builds – anyone who has visited Neva River will know why.
I recently saw word via Ziki Questi that Neva was moving towards re-opening the region. Since then, I’ve been waiting (not a little impatiently, I admit – along with a lot of other people!) for the doors to once again open.
This is inevitably going to lead to a stampede to get to Neva River – indeed, but the time I got there, the place was fairly teeming with people; it’s a measure of the popularity of Neva’s builds. If you have 30-40 minutes some time in the next couple of weeks, I urge you to join the queue, particularly if you are, to borrow from Honour McMillan, a landscape junkie.
Last time around, the region focused on a water theme, with low sandbanks, waterlogged copses and small fields of grass beneath an orange sky. This time, Neva has gone for something far more undulating, but with a few little eclectic twists. From coastal beaches through rural country to deep gorges, with high bridges, meandering streams, and broad lakes, Neva River presents a landscape which offers much to see, and not a few things to do.
Starting at the tall lighthouse, located at the headland at one end of the region, you can follow wooden walkways, paths and rutted tracks across the region, encountering other visitors, the local animals (mostly sheep) and various delights and oddities which make a visit to Neva River something of an exploration (just how did a fishing boat end up so land-locked…?).
The region come with its own late afternoon windlight setting, but as is my wont, I opted to go for my “standard” settings, based around a couple of windlight presents I’ve slightly tweaked, and which I like as I feel they give a more natural look and feel to places (one is actually my default viewer’s standard windlight setting nowadays). If the images here don’t do the build justice, blame me, not Neva Crystall!
I will confess that I had a few problems during my wanderings through the region. However, I think these were pretty much down to the fact that the place is rather busy, people-wise, right now and the fact that I’m using a pre-release of a viewer, so SL is a little bit on the bumpy side for me right now.
All-in-all the rebuild has been worth the wait; once again Neva River is on the list of “must places” to visit in SL – but those wishing to do so had best hurry; the doors may not be open for ever!
Following the announcement that Curiosity had found chemical and mineral signatures pointing towards Mars – or at the very least, Gale Crater – once being wet enough to create the right conditions in which micro-organisms may have once survived, the mission team has continued to analyse data returned by the rover over the last several weeks. In doing so, they have uncovered further evidence as to role of water in area during wet periods of Mars’ past.
The most recent findings from the Mars Science Laboratory team was presented to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, being held in Texas, on March 18th, in which the team discussed the use of the infrared-imaging capability of the Mastcam system and the neutron-firing Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument to find further evidence of the hydration of minerals in the area.
Mastcam’s ability to capture infra-red images means it can be used as a mineral-detecting tool and as a means of observing hydration in surface rock features, where the ratio of brightness in images captured at different near-infrared wavelengths can indicate the presence of hydrated minerals. The technique was used to check rocks in the “Yellowknife Bay” area and has revealed some rock formations in the area to be crisscrossed with bright veins.
An area of the target rock “Knorr” at “Yellowknife Bay”, some 25 cm (10 inches) across, mapping the amount of mineral hydration indicated by a ratio of near-infrared reflectance intensities as detected by Curiosity’s Mastcam. The scale on the right shows the assignment of colours for relative strength of the calculated signal for hydration. The map shows that the stronger signals for hydration are associated with pale veins and light-toned nodules in the rock. This image and data were recorded on Sol 133 (Dec. 20, 2012) – click to enlarge
“With Mastcam, we see elevated hydration signals in the narrow veins that cut many of the rocks in this area,” said Melissa Rice of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock matrix.” She went on to explain, “What Mastcam is seeing is water that is bound in the mineral structure of the rocks. This water is left over from a previous wet era and is now trapped and preserved in these hydrated minerals.”
The Russian-made DAN instrument on Curiosity detects hydrogen beneath the rover. At the rover’s very dry study area on Mars, the detected hydrogen is mainly in water molecules bound into minerals. “We definitely see signal variation along the traverse from the landing point to Yellowknife Bay,” said DAN Deputy Principal Investigator Maxim Litvak of the Space Research Institute, Moscow. “More water is detected at Yellowknife Bay than earlier on the route. Even within Yellowknife Bay, we see significant variation.”
Findings from the Canadian-made Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) on Curiosity’s arm-mounted turret indicate that the wet environmental processes that produced clay at Yellowknife Bay did so without much change in the overall mix of chemical elements present, and confirmed the elemental composition of the outcrop Curiosity drilled into matches the composition of basalt, the most common rock-type on Mars. The APXS findings were initially affected by the dust layer common to most surfaces on Mars, which masked the basaltic signature of the rocks until the rover’s wire brush was used to scrub a section of rock clean of the dust.
“By removing the dust, we’ve got a better reading that pushes the classification toward basaltic composition,” Curiosity science team member Mariek Schmidt said. The sedimentary rocks at Yellowknife Bay likely formed when original basaltic rocks were broken into fragments, transported, re-deposited as sedimentary particles, and mineralogically altered by exposure to water.
On Tuesday March 19th, the Main channel received the server maintenance package which had been re-deployed to Magnum in week 11. As with the Magnum re-deploy, it excludes the fix for VWR-786 while LL go “back to the drawing board” to try to correct issues. However, it does include the following two fixes:
BUG-1612: region Owners and estate managers finding they are unable to teleport back to their region after disabling direct teleports to the region
SVC-8019: region visibility delays following region restarts.
The release notes for the deployment are available on the SL wiki, as usual.
Release Candidate Channels
On Wednesday March 20th, the Release Candidate channels should receive the following updates:
BlueSteel and LeTigre: should receive the same updates as deployed to the SLS channel on Tuesday March 19th, but otherwise retain the same updates received in week 11 – release notes (BlueSteel)
Magnum: should receive further updates to Andrew Linden’s interest list work, as per the release notes. Specific interest list bug fixes included with this update comprise:
Updates for objects that are out of view are delayed for a maximum of 5 seconds, at which point they will be sent (mitigates BUG-1779)
Fix for “No object updates from vehicles after some region crossings” (BUG-1814)
Fix for “Agent appears in incorrect position to other agents after being moved by a sim teleporter” (BUG-1795).
Server-side Baking
As reported in week 11, the second official Server-side Baking pile-on / load test appeared to go well on Thursday March 14th. Speaking at the Content Creator’s User Group meeting, SSB project lead Nyx Linden reported:
Looks like things are going well overall – the back-end services are performing well. There are still some inventory and attachment rezzing issues, but these are believed to not be regressions from current limits.
A few reports of issues, some of which we have fixes for, others we’re investigating, and we’re looking at what it would take to fix up the systems that were falling over … there were a couple of new bug reports we’re investigating.
A further SSB pile-on / load test conducted in Friday 15th March, but exclusively with the Firestorm viewer pre-release with SSB support. Numbers at the Firestorm test were roughly the same as those for the “official” test, and overall, the outcome was the same – much lower reported SSB issues, but similar problems with outfit attachments rezzing from inventory (or rather, failing to), which was common to both parts of the test.
Peoiple gather for the Firestorm SSB pile-on / load test, March 15th
The inventory issues have themselves become more of a focus of investigation outside of SSB itself (attachments aren’t affected by the SSB code changes, which relate directly to the likes of skin, shape and clothing layer changes. While the inventory issues were thought to relate solely to Aditi, Nyx indicated that the problem is likely common to Agni as well. commenting:
We were seeing similar failures in inventory, etc on both the old pipeline and the new pipeline, and in areas that we didn’t change. So if we repeated the test on Agni we think we’d see similar failures. We’re looking at the root causes, but attachment rezzing failures won’t necessarily block our first release … We’re looking at the inventory & attachment issues and where their root causes are.
Expect further updates on the latter issue as they become known.
HTTP Testing
All of the test regions for Monty Linden’s upcoming HTTP updates are now up-and-running on Aditi, and available for public access (allowing for the caps on avatars in the primary test regions). The regions are:
As noted in previous project reports, Monty is keep to have TPVs and scripters test the capabilities in order to gather more comprehensive data on his work.
Update August 5th, 2013: Wretched Hollow has reloacted to Rainbow Coast.
Rolling Restarts run every Tuesday and Wednesday (well, as a rule). For the uninitiated, and without delving into the deeper intricacies of what goes where and how, Tuesday sees updates to the Second Life Server (“Main”) channel, which accounts for about 70% of the regions on grid, and Wednesday sees the three “Release Candidate” channels (called BlueSteel, Magnum and LeTigre and which account for around 10% of the grid apiece) get their updates. For those wishing to know more on this, info on the various deployments can be found in my SL projects updates.
Wretched Hollow
I mention rolling restarts, because they often mean that when logging-in to Second Life you don’t always get to go where you intended, be it home or anywhere else. At best you end up being diverted to a “location nearby” or to a “safe” hub (some of which seem, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, to have some strange new meaning of the word “safe” we’ve not been previously aware of), at worst you get a message pop-up during the log-in process stating the viewer has been “unable to connect to a simulator”.
Such was the case with me recently. I had planned an excursion to a specific region, but a rolling restart left me delving into the Destination Guide and opting for pot luck after I was left unable to connect to my desired destination.
Wretched Hollow
So it was that I ended up at Wretched Hollow, which describes itself thus:
A dark, whimsical sim inspired by the love of Gothic Romance and Neo-Victorian things. As one of Second Life’s best-kept secrets, Wretched Hollow is home to the Wretched Dollies store and has several places to explore, including a small town and a fishing inlet with dock.
The first part of the description was enough to have me teleporting over to check things out. What I found was very much a curious mix, possibly sliding more towards the Victorian than the Gothic, but certainly which touches of whimsy, be it with the 18th century ships anchored offshore, or the very much more recent oil drums providing a little warmth for those out on the streets of the township.
Wretched Hallow
The region is roughly split into two parts: a more rural, open setting, with a couple of private residences (one of which appears to belong to region holder Star Fairymeadow) The other part of the region forms an urban setting which provides a home for Star’s Wretched Dollies brand, offering a range of products – clothing, doll accessories, furniture – with a Gothic / Victorian leaning, as well as Star’s own textures and her range for Petites. For those into the club scene, the town also boasts an underground – literally – club featuring a broad mix of music (although Gothic Rock / Industrial / Darkwave, etc., seems to bt the primary theme).
I was drawn to the town because of its strong Victorian look and feel which, together with the default windlight setting and style of buildings, immediately put me in mind of the East End of London, and specifically the Whitechapel area and going out towards the old London docks of yesteryear. A newspaper billboard passed as I explored the streets heightened this feeling even more.
While Robert Downey Jr didn’t scuttle by me hurriedly swapping one disguise for another as he pursued clues to the mystery of the East End murders, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised had he done.
Wretched Hollow
Like many store-front regions in SL, Wretched Hollow has been put together with a creative skill which is deserving of time spent exploring it, and which lends itself to a lot of playing around with windlight options. The town certainly offers an opportunity for the avid SL photographer to come up with some memorable images and possible vignettes (although just clearing matters of using the region for photography with Star ahead of time would obviously be for the best).
For my part, I enjoyed my little unexpected excursion to the streets of Old London; Wretched Hollow came as a very pleasant surprise in my meanderings and allowed my to focus on a subject and setting a little bit outside the norm for this blog.
This summary is published every Monday and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Viewer Round-up Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware) and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy
By its nature, this summary will always be in arrears
The Viewer Round-up Page is updated as soon as I’m aware of any releases / changes to viewers & clients, and should be referred to for more up-to-date information as the week progresses
The Viewer Round-up Page also includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog.
Updates for the week ending: March 17th, 2013
SL Viewer updates:
Beta viewer rolled to 3.5.0.271843 on March 14th – core update: CHUI
Development viewer rolled to 3.5.1.271846 on March 14th – core update: CHUI integration (wiki page)
Niran’s Viewer updated to 2.1.3 on March 11th – core updates: UI updates; updates to texture handling
Thursday March 21st will see an all-day concert staged at the SL Buddy Walk 2013, which I previewed recently.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 