Dwell On It » Software

Reference implementations

Tateru Nino — Fri, 20 May 2011 06:36:17 +0000

In conjunction with a specification (or documentation, if you prefer the more inclusive term), a reference implementation is a good thing. Without a specification, a reference implementation is an astonishingly efficient way of propagating bugs into third-party software.

The Second Life viewer is in the latter category, alas.

Email evolved

Tateru Nino — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:59:29 +0000

In a way, Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs – like Sendmail and Postfix) are somewhat like relics of our past.

They stand like great monuments to the baroque and arcane tasks that were once required to get an email from one person to another.

Like vast pyramids raised up just to inter some dead person, MTAs hint at the monumental complexity that used to be email.

Unencumbered viewer code

Tateru Nino — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 11:16:43 +0000

Linden Lab maintains the source code for its viewer as an unencumbered asset (through the mechanism of contribution agreements). This allows it to maintain the value of the codebase in the event of a sale, but brings with it some rather obvious problems.


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Imprudence Experimental Release: 2010.10.23

Tateru Nino — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 01:54:56 +0000

The latest build of the Imprudence viewer experimental branch is out now.

Second Life Mesh source code live

Tateru Nino — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 02:19:43 +0000

The Second Life Mesh viewer source code just went live a few minutes ago. For those of you who have been wondering why it didn’t come out on the promised date, I’ve got no idea either.

Imprudence 1.3.0 final

Tateru Nino — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:46:24 +0000

My favourite third-party viewer, Imprudence, has moved its 1.3.0 developments out of beta and into release as 1.3.0 final.

This is, to my way of thinking, a good thing indeed.


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New Second Life terms of service

Tateru Nino — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 05:41:51 +0000

Another revision has turned up to the Second Life terms of service today. There’s not any shocks this time around, unlike earlier editions.

The keys to the kingdom

Tateru Nino — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:06:25 +0000

Back when the Internet was already old, but the Web was just starting out, a small company formed that was based heavily around transaction security and digital deliverables. The initial heart of the company were two men with money, one man who pretended to know technology, and a musician who had learned an obscure dialect of BASIC and imagined that he knew everything there was to know about software security.

FireSabre Consulting offers OpenSim product to educators in place of Teen Second Life

Tateru Nino — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 01:01:10 +0000

As we crawl (or speed, depending on your temporal perspective) towards the closure date of Teen Second Life, it’s only reasonable that one or more groups would emerge with possible alternatives.


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Linden Lab to open up viewer mesh code

Tateru Nino — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:32:57 +0000

Just a short note, as my Internet service is more down than up right at the moment, but Linden Lab says that the viewer code for the new Mesh features will be made public right about the time that the Mesh features go open beta.

When will that be? Not long now, apparently. The impression given is that it may only be days away.

Linden Lab doesn’t back Oz on KDU library

Tateru Nino — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 04:33:52 +0000

The big thing on my mind back at the beginning of the week was whether the new position on the KDU library was indeed the official position and whether the Lab was serious about the erroneous statements about GPL-violations.

Over the last few years, it has quite often been the case that the Lab and an individual Linden (or a team of Linden staffers) have disagreed or had differences of understanding on certain key matters.


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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.

Cyber-warfare and cyber-waffle

Tateru Nino — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:07:02 +0000

There’s an old saying about Internet experts. How do you tell the ones who are any good? They don’t ever use cyber as a prefix for random words.

Most people who talk about ‘cyber-warfare’ are full of bunk, and most of what you know about computers, networks, computer security and the Internet from television programmes and movies is woefully wrong.

Imprudence 1.3.0 RC3 available

Tateru Nino — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 03:15:47 +0000

Mmmm. A new Imprudence viewer release candidate, with fixes and a yummy selection of fonts. Delicious! Seems to work a treat as expected.

Third-party Second Life viewer developers call bullshit on Linden Lab GPL-violation claim

Tateru Nino — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 07:30:16 +0000

“[Linden Lab] has every right to refuse to list third-party software in [its] viewer directory or to bar third-party software from the grid, for [any reason not prohibited by law],” said one developer who declined to be named,”but suggesting [in this case] that third-party developers are violating [the GNU Public License and intellectual property rights] is just bullshit. [It’s] wrong and it’s defamatory.”

I’ve paraphrased that just a little, partly to tone the language down a touch.

And back we go to LLKDU, the extended Kakadu JPEG2000 library.


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No KDU for you, says Oz Linden

Tateru Nino — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 03:46:12 +0000

Today, Oz Linden delivered an in-world opinion on the ability of third-party Second Life viewers to use the LLKDU JPEG2000 decoding library that has shipped with Linden Lab’s official viewers to-date.


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My next missteps for Mesh Import

Tateru Nino — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:02:03 +0000

I’m not sure quite what to make of the latest update from the Lab on Mesh Import – other than it seems to be redundant. I’ve got mixed feelings, certainly.

How the other half lives

Tateru Nino — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 18:13:12 +0000

Just a few years ago (only 5 years ago), I was a CTO in a global logistics company. Now, the logistics biz isn’t an industry where you can do your job if your PC isn’t working. You can’t just pull out paper and a pen and get anything at all done. 95% of the job is purely electronic.

The remaining 5% generated a heck of a lot of paper, though. While everyone could send and receive all manner of documents by email nearly instantly, almost every one of those documents needed to be resent … by fax.

Emerald viewer forked

Tateru Nino — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 10:03:22 +0000

So, some of the old crowd from the Emerald dev team have kicked off a new viewer project, starting with the source code of the old one, after a key Emerald developer dug his heels in and killed the old project.

As described on the tin

Tateru Nino — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:13:53 +0000

Max Kleiber dropped a comment just a few minutes ago that really gave me pause for some thought.


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