Archive for the ‘Public service announcements’ Category

I just finished my new SL avatar mesh (not based on Ruth this time). It is now all cleaned up, quadified (so it can be meshsmoothed) and all the UVs have been assembled on a single 2×2 layout so you can do renders in a single pass.

You are free to use it , it should import just fine, but to be sure you might want to check that the scene is setup in meters.

DOWNLOAD

This is a little trick i found that changed my daily life using the Viewer 2.x for SecondLife.

They made this sort of tray bar where every popups dock after a few seconds, i kind of like this concept because then multiple IM windows do not take so much space, however what always drove me nuts was that if you didn’t interact with the popups (they are called “toaster popups by the way) they would auto dock into the corresponding “category”.

That made the thing extremely frustrating for me especially with objects permissions requests and dialog menus.

Thankfully, this is a thing of the past, here is how i solved this problem:

• In Preferences -> Chat, uncheck both options in “Enable incoming chat popups” This will prevent group chat and Instant messages from creating toaster popups (they will still create a little “chat bubble” button in the tray bar)
• hit CTRL + ALT + D (or CTRL + ALT  + SHIFT + D if it works for you) to reveal the Advanced/Develop toolbar buttons if you haven’t them active already.
• In Advanced -> Show debug settings, lookup the value “NotificationToastLifeTime” and change it from it’s default (5 seconds) to an absurdely high number under 214748368.

What it does is that it stops IMs and chat to show popups, which usually are redundant since docked chat windows with new messages are marked with an orange bubble. And it also makes any other popup window remain (almost) permanently on screen until clicked, so you have all the time you want to accept this hug request or that other menu thing.

I wasn’t able to participate to the closed beta of the meshes, so i figured this would be the occasion for me to test what will probably be the biggest change in SecondLife history since the introduction of custom animations (yeap, THIS big)

Linden Labs aparently settled for the Collada format which is a good thing, it’s a widely supported format, flexible and easy to work with, altho i did have some trouble with 3dsmax2010,  it seems that the official Collada export plugin doesn’t export the texture coordinates properly, while the 3dsmax collada exporter doesn’t have such issues. (I would have expected the opposite frankly…)

I’ve been making a couple of nice furnitures for a side project and decided that they would be perfect quandidates for secondlife.

The “weight in prims” system is kind of weird as some of my objects are rated really low, while some others rate much higher, but that might be related to how i’ve setup the LOD.

The mesh viewer seems to have it’s own adaptive degradation tool to generate the lods for you, but i wouldn’t rely too much on it, especially for the physic mesh, whenever possible you should make your own physic mesh, hell for most objects, a couple of boxes usually do the trick.

Physics meshes created through the degradation of the Visible mesh are going to be glitchy in some cases, you can count on it, so take the extra 30 seconds to piece together a proper physic mesh, the less detailed, the better!

Also the sl mesh uploader consider ever part of a mesh as a separate object, so unless that’s what you want, you should probably merge all the parts before export.

SL Meshes also support Multi sub object Materials, which basically means you can setup your own “faces” like if it was a prim, but i think the limit is 6 or 8, or something.

Another interesting thing, a simple cube from 3D studio actually weight LESS prims that an SL cube, i know why but i thought it was funny, it’s actually more efficient to make everything in your mesh than to rely on external prims, a simple cube weight 0.3 prims for example.

I’m sure we will see peoples making “low primcount prim-like meshes”

But enough chit chat, a few screenshots!

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a pair of scripts i designed in order to create and restore easily incremental backups of a game server, they allow you to backup automatically a specific folder every 30 minutes every backup is labeled with date hour/minutes/seconds and the script flush every backups that are older than seven days (you can change that obviously)

The system uses incremental updates through the “dar” program, it creates a master backup file every mornings at 0:00 and creates incremental backups every 30 minutes. This means only what changed through the day is saved instead of having one full backup 48 times a day.

this script you should execute through a cron job:

#/bin/sh
#script: backup_incremental.sh
#the folder we want to backup is /home/username/folder_to_backup

WORKING_DIR=/home/username
FOLDER=folder_to_backup
BACKUP_FOLDER=/my/BACKUP

DAY=`date -I`
HOUR=`date +%H%M%S`

#this define the day date of the backups we want to delete
OLD=`date -I -d "-1weeks"`

cd $WORKING_DIR

if [ -f ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/${DAY}.1.dar ]
then
	echo "master backup exist, making incremental update."
	LASTSLICE=`ls -1cr ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/${DAY}*.dar |tail -1`
	echo "last slice is: ${LASTSLICE}"
	dar -c ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/${DAY}-${HOUR} -R ${WORKING_DIR}/${FOLDER} -P . -A ${LASTSLICE%%.*}
else
	echo "creating daily master backup"
	dar -c ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/${DAY} -R ${WORKING_DIR}/${FOLDER} -P .
	echo "deleting 7 days old backup (${OLD})"

	#we remove the older backups, if we can
	rm ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/${OLD}*
fi

Example cron job to execute this script (dev/null is required because dar tend to be quite chatty):

*/30 * * * * /home/user/scripts/backup_incremental.sh >> /dev/null 2>&1

Restoring backups with dar is a little tedious because you have to restore every incremental backups one by one. This script will restore the master backup and every incremental backups up to the one you defined in the folder of your choice.

#/bin/sh
#script: restore_incremental.sh

if [ -n "$3" ]; then
        if [ -f "$1" ]; then
                if [ -f "$2" ]; then

                        FS_ROOT="$3"
                        MASTER_DAR="${1%%.*}"
                        LAST_BACKUP="${2%%.*}"
                        FILES=`ls -m1cr ${MASTER_DAR}*.dar`

                        echo "MASTER DAR FILE is: ${MASTER_DAR}"
                        echo "LAST BACKUP is: ${LAST_BACKUP}"
                        echo "File list: ${FILES}"

                        for file in ${FILES}; do
                                echo "Processing... ${file}"
                                dar -Ox ${file%%.*} -w -R "$FS_ROOT"
                                if [ "${file%%.*}" == "${LAST_BACKUP}" ]; then
                                        echo "This was our last file."
                                        break
                                fi
                        done
                        echo "All done."
                else
                        echo "ERROR: this increment doesn't exist."
                fi
        else
                echo "ERROR: this base dar doesn't exist."
        fi
else
   echo "Not enough parameters.

Usage:
restore_incremental.sh master_backup.1.dar last_incremental_backup.1.dar /my/destination/folder/"
fi

Here is a little story about my experience with buying a “Maitreya Nimue” ( Created by Onyx LeShelle ) hair pack in SecondLife, which is one of the few specialized products that I believe i’m better off buying than attempting to build myself.

I made this cute little script a few weeks ago that show an animated hover text over your head when you are typing, so that, would you chose to disable the sound and typing animation, peoples can still know that you are typing something. Simple enough right?

Now when I buy hairs I like to get them MOD COPY, and I never buy nomod hairs, being a builder, I always end up tweaking this and that, add or remove parts of it.

Now to add a script to an attachment you have to rez it on your land and drop the script inside, which I tried to do. To my surprise, every time I tried the hairs would disappear. It didn’t take me very long to figure out it wasn’t the sim having a glitch but YET ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE PESKY “PROTECTION” SCRIPTS.

Turned out after editing the hairs on a noscript land (yeah , that’s all it takes to fool this “bullet proof” copy protection. That there was no script in the root prim, nor aparently in none of the hair prims. Yeah it was much more vicious, there was tiny little prims scattered here and there (3 to 5) inside the hair prims, and these where holding the pesky protection script.

Hello hair creators? I buy MOD creations from you that means I expect MODIFY RIGHTS, I had to spend 10 minutes on each color of the hair pack to basically DELOUSE each haircut!

Yes, delouse because what else can it be? it’s tiny, near invisible, and annoying as hell!

Now for the fun here is a little review of the thing:

Personal rating: 0/10 , Your stuff can look amazing and professional, as long as you try to pull bullshit like this, I won’t shop at your place anymore, there are plenty of honest hair designers to satisfy me, it doesn’t protect you, it doesn’t work, it only piss your legitimate customers.

Because i truly believe that what we are doing on the Internet is no one’s business, whether we have something to hide or not, i support the use of SSL on as many websites as possible, so it’s only logical that i try to have a working ssl version of my blog.

So what is this SSL thing about?

For the non geeks amongst us, when you or i browse websites, every information i send and receive from said website travel in “plain text” format, which means that anyone that is relaying this piece of information from me to it’s destination, and vice verse can very easily see what websites i am looking at or what keywords i entered on google.

When you use an SSL website (if the URL starts with “https://” instead of “http://” the information are encrypted both ways between you and the website you are visiting.

That means that, yes your ISP may know that you are connecting to this, or that computer, they know you are probably visiting a website, but they cannot see what you are doing.

This is used by many online shops and online banking systems, usually everything involving sums of money is secured through SSL.

Why does it matter?

Because it shouldn’t be limited to this! Many governments are starting to complain about the rise in encrypted communications.

Saudi Arabia was about to ban Blackberry cellphones because they couldn’t easily access the encrypted information between Blackberry cellphones and RIM’s servers.

Google started a new beta service where you can connect to them and perform searches in https (  ), it doesn’t offer yet all the the common functions like image search but it’s already a nice step forward.

https://encrypted.google.com

The bottom line is that as surveillance systems become faster and more efficient, it is vital in order to keep our freedom that we use the tools that are available today to protect ourselves. If SSL browsing (and encrypted communications in general) becomes more widespread it will make general surveillance nearly impossible.

This is a thing that really agravate me, the proliferation of “i like it” buttons and comment windows that ask me to log on facebook, or simply websites that use your facebook session to log you in.

So here is a cure, for those who use any ad blocker compatible with AdblockPlus rules (AdThwart on chrome) simply add the following custom rules:

||*.facebook.*^$domain=~facebook.com|~127.0.0.1
||facebook.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net
||facebook.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbc
||fbcdn.com/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.netdn.net
||fbcdn.net/*$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net

Those rules will tell your navigator to block anything coming from facebook’s hosts, unless you are actually visiting facebook.

I just got this new keyboard working and have been making a few shortcuts triggered by key combinations, like ctrl+Alt+Shift+F12 and the like, and here are a few things I learned that should help everyone doing those kind of things.

1. The key combo you chose for your shortcut WONT work, or won’t be reloaded on next reboot unless it is sitting in specific folders, like the Start menu folder.
2. Shortcuts called with key combinations are unexplicably SLOW to start for some reason. But there is an easy fix to this:

The fix for Custom keyboard shortcuts slowness:

• Open the registry editor Start > Run > Regedit.exe
• navigate to the following key:

HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Session Manager

• right click and choose: New Value > Dword
• Name the new value “SafeDllSearchMode”
• Set it’s value to 1
• Reboot

This fix should remove most of the lag you experience when executing a custom keyboard shortcut.