Dwell On It » How To

Looking for Second Life users to connect with on Google Plus?

Tateru Nino — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:05:46 +0000

It’s kind of tricky, isn’t it? If you don’t already know their email addresses, how do you find them?

Actually, you can use Google itself to search for matching Google Profiles.


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Second Life crashed my system!

Tateru Nino — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:12:26 +0000

Or slowed it down, or made it reset or caused it to go all Blue Screen of Death, or just generally messed it up, and it has been running really slow every since you installed it.

Well, no. It didn’t, necessarily, and here’s why.

How to: Building a solid PC for fast Second Life use

Tateru Nino — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:20:10 +0000

Being that I just got a new PC – entirely thanks to you, gentle readers – let’s talk hardware that will run Second Life well. That is, kit that will work smoothly and not turn into a slide-show even if you crank everything up.

Mailbag: How can I copyright my Second Life work?

Tateru Nino — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 06:39:34 +0000

The electronic mailbag continues to be stuffed to overflowing, but I figured I would respond to this particular one in a post of its own, since Copyright – while it is ubiquitous, touching almost every point of our lives – continues to be poorly understood.

I’m trying to create a small store to sell sculpted Jewellery in Second Life.. but I’m worried about content theft as anyone… and so, I noticed a post from yours on the internet called “Property, Second Life, backups and you” explaining some basic topics about this, .. and I become very interested in the matter, now my straight question… Do you know how can I copyright my sculpties? I have noticed several businesses saying their creations have some sort of “copyright”, I want to copyright several sculpties of my own creation, sculpties that I can use as components to create several products, please I need advice in this matter ^^ Thank you very much.


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More fun with Second Life and squid

Tateru Nino — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 01:54:23 +0000

You might recall that I wrote a – rather complex – Read more ...

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Modem wars, part 2: Eliminating a very common source of lag

Tateru Nino — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:58:10 +0000

Yesterday, I didn’t really have time to go over the network improvement that I posted, and explain it in more detail. Here’s the dope, starting with a little background.


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The new media system

Tateru Nino — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 11:10:53 +0000

A couple of days ago, I took one of our old desktop PCs out of the storage shed, dusted it off, and for a cost of exactly zero dollars and some time, turned it into a media system for the living room.

Forget the DVD player, which has been gathering dust ever since. This is like living in the future. It’s that good.


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Optimising profit

Tateru Nino — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 03:38:10 +0000

I’m going to talk a little about profit optimisation here. Principally, this is because I’m going to refer back to it later.

If your market is above a certain (variable) minimum size, profit optimisation involves setting a price that maximises the amount of profit you would receive from sales of goods and/or services. Read more ...


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Proxying Second Life HTTP-textures with Squid

Tateru Nino — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 08:01:35 +0000

I’ve been doing some experiments with HTTP textures, and yes, you can proxy/cache them external to your machine even though the viewer doesn’t support it.

There are benefits to this and some downsides. It’s particularly handy if you’re behind a corporate or educational firewall and your network admin would prefer to proxy rather than open up a new port. Caching improvements, alas, are fairly dubious.

This is moderately advanced material.

How to: Get and install the Mektek Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries release, and get it to actually work

Tateru Nino — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:08:15 +0000

Well, after a while of thinking that the whole thing might just become vaporware, Mektek did release the free Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries game as promised yesterday, in conjunction with Microsoft.

Problem is that within about an hour or two the name-servers for their domain failed and while they came up a few hours ago, the Web-site itself is now looking deceased – which also essentially kills Mektek’s digital download system. If, however, you’ve got about 1.8GB of bandwidth free, you can still get the release and get it to work.

DIY: A personal message from Linden Lab

Tateru Nino — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:14:30 +0000

Dying to hear back from Linden Lab, but can’t be bothered actually sending them something? Or have you been waiting weeks for a reply?

Trouble yourself no longer, you can now have the reply you’ve always dreamed of!


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When high-performance programming goes bad – scheduler starvation

Tateru Nino — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:29:31 +0000

So, your team has worked hard on designing a high-performance software system. One of the key components is a thread or service designed to buffer and protect the application from slow operations by caching the response of lookups from slower or more distant systems (like frequently used credential data or permissions, for example that might be coming from database servers).

On the test-bench, everything looks good and then the code goes into production. Everything scales nicely up to peak loads, and then the whole system begins to stall and stutter. Performance ratchets in a staccato sinusoid, working just fine here, and coming to an almost complete halt there. After a while, as overall load falls and end-users become frustrated, it all sorts itself out and runs smoothly, until just after the next peak load.

You direct the team to investigate, to profile code, to monitor logs and performance. Nobody can find a link. Your engineers come up with plans to optimize the cache service and eke every microsecond of performance out of it.

Mysteriously, the problem just gets worse, not better despite thousands of hours and weeks or months of investigation, and tuning. Someone discovers that disabling hyperthreading on the server mitigates the problem significantly, but nobody’s closer to a solution.

Congratulations, you’ve hit a common, but very rarely understood problem in high-performance systems design. It’s bitten almost every high-performance systems shop, yet almost nobody has truly solved the problem, because hardly anyone has understood the true cause at the time. Most engineers end up working around it, because they never quite know where to look.

Let’s save the day and tell your team where to look. It might not be the source of your particular problem, but ruling it out early can save you tens of thousands of dollars in development, and far more than that in frustrated customers.


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The humble trademark

Tateru Nino — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:10:36 +0000

Trademarks are poor misunderstood things.

Way back when, trademarks were called hallmarks, makers’ marks, earmarks and brands.

Fixing the black screen

Tateru Nino — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:09:09 +0000

If you’re a Windows gamer, you’ve very likely had the issue where you’ve installed a game (including, but not limited to, Scrapland or System Shock 2), and when you start up the game, you get a black screen. Maybe there’s sound, maybe not. Maybe the application works except for the video – and maybe it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you often have to use control-alt-delete to break out and kill the process.

There’s a bunch of possible causes, but one of the most common ones is easy to fix.


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Back up your passwords

Tateru Nino — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:10:20 +0000

Okay, so you probably use a password manager or something like that, because – face it – you’re probably not daft enough to use the same password for everything, right? Right? Right!

Your ‘password manager’ might be a simple paper notebook, something like KeePass (recommended, by the way), a sheet of paper, or a simple text-file that you keep somewhere on your hard-drive. Whatever it is, just think a moment. If there was a fire or a flood or a robbery or whatever at home, would you still have your passwords?

How to build a successful blog

Tateru Nino — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:19:01 +0000

There’s all sorts of places that will offer to teach you how to build up a successful blog. Pretty much all of them will charge you for it at some point.

Here’s my pro-tip and it costs you nothing, except the time to read about it and to think about it.


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How to become the richest person in the world

Tateru Nino — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:48:44 +0000

How do you become the richest person in the world in virtually no time at all?

Find a way to stop unauthorized copying of content.

Simple setup for DOSBox games

Tateru Nino — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:11:03 +0000

Though DOSBox is probably the best way to run old DOS software (particularly old DOS games) on pretty much any system or Operating System, it can be a little bit on the daunting side, being that it is all jam-packed with options. Options you don’t want to have to wade through.

It doesn’t actually have to be a big deal if you’re on Windows, because there’s a companion tool that will make things a whole lot simpler.


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Great free tools for Second Life content-creators

Tateru Nino — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:35:31 +0000

Content creation in Second Life sounds great, until you start looking at the price-tags on some of the pro software that’s commonly used to create it.

If you’re a content-creator who cares about creator-rights, you probably shouldn’t be using a bootleg copy of Photoshop (for example) to make your stuff. You can do better.

Here’s a short roundup of some great free tools that get the job done, do it well, won’t stress out your PC, and won’t blow your budget … on account of, you know, being free.

How to: Five tips for cheaper digital downloads

Tateru Nino — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:09:43 +0000

Odds are you don’t have a ton of cash to throw around. I know that I don’t. So, let’s talk about stretching your Windows gaming dollar a bit further.

There’s actually quite a number of ways, but let’s look at a simple set of tips for cheaper digital downloads.