Archive for the ‘shit happens’ Category

I just spent most of friday and saturday fixing a problem with my web server. For the non tech savvy, most typical web servers are composed of 3 distinct parts that must work together to produce your average dynamic content website:

• The web server itself (Apache in my case): responsible for delivering and presenting the pages aswell as receiving the user inputs.
• The database server (Mysql for example): responsible of storing, retrieving and performing database operations.
• The script engine (PHP ): this vary from language to language, but in essence, it is producing most of the dynamic content on a website.

Those are essentially 3 completely independent pieces of software that are glued together.

Now back to my problem. I am running a multi site setup, which means several websites are running on the same machine, to do this cleanly, I was using an apache module called mpm_itk that allows me to neatly separate each distinct site on its own apache/php instance.

Since about a week we have encountered problems, with instances segfaulting (that’s the technical term for crashing 🙂 ). apparently the problem was due to the php module we where using, it is prone to crash when running in a prefork system like this one.

To overcome this we moved to php_fpm, which runs the php script engine separately from the web server, what’s even better is that we can run several “pools” of it, one for each site, all we have to do is to specify the socket for each site in each virtual host configuration file.

For those who are interested by this alternative to the regular php module.

I apologise for the long time without anything new, initially I thought that I was going to take a short break, waiting for my replacement display adapter to arrive ( it’s really hard to work without a dual display once you got used to it ), but I just received a mail of the company explaining me they had stock problems on this specific spare part and that I would be delivered as soon as they receive it.

I thought about putting another poll up but I think I will postpone that after I’m done with the next project.

I’m apologize for the long inactivity, it was completely independent of my will. My computer decided to commit suicide Tuesday and i only got the replacement parts today.

Stay tuned for something new very soon 😉

I was done. All the hoods where ready, and i only had to make the product pictures. And then as my avatar smiled at me between screenshots.

This is where  I realised that i forgot to alpha out the mouth and teeth section, I have to fix it and re upload everything…

Well… more work to do.

-EDIT-

Another issue with the ponytail hole alpha, this isn’t my lucky day 😀

I’ve started working on something that was bugging me for a while, i really want to have a better array of hoods available at my shop. So this is what I’ve been doing today, or more accurately: what I’ve been failing at today.

It looks bad, the texture looks fine, but it sucks when worn. I must have done something wrong somewhere.

Anyway, I’m not sure this is going to be the thing I will release next, maybe i will work on other things too. But i thought that after a week of silence, I should at least tell what I’ve been up to.

Sunday I came back from a little visit to my family and it was really hot. So I took a long cold shower and stood in front of a blowing fan. Today is the result, it’s the middle of the summer and I caught a pretty bad cold.

My time is spent sleeping , sneezing and trying to play a game or two. I hope everyone understand that, in my current state… I cannot work.

The last post was a bit… on edge, I want to thank the support team for processing my rollback this fast.

I had to setup a backup update server in emergency because apparently my region ate the regular one.

I requested a region rollback from Linden Labs, please tell me if anything iffy happens.

I’m sorry to everyone waiting for the new catsuits. I know, the weeks are slowly piling up and beside the face slapper that I made for valentine day,still no catsuits. To explain why it’s taking so long I’m going to sum up, point by point:

The catsuit textures have several options beyond the usual color choice:

• 14 colors like all the KDC latex.
• You can choose if you want metallic looking zips or more discrete plastic ones that closely match the latex color.
• You can choose between 3 “entry” styles for the main zip: front to back, back to front, and shoulder entry.
• You can have it with or without breast zips.

That’s a grand total of 270 textures total that I had to make, which took the bulk of the time.

Now I thought I was done, basically last Thursday, but now I also have to make all the layers in SL, by color that’s a total of 72 clothing “pieces” for each color, for a total of 1008. Since I can’t really automate this, that’s 1008 garments I have to edit, put textures in and save, not only is it absolutely mind numbing, but I have to double-check I didn’t make any errors.

I’m not even sure how I’m going to package this in a clean and easy way for you all.

I was thinking that I could release the suits in 3 formats:

• Basic: Contain a single set of options, most likely Front to back, non metallic, no breast zips.
• Deluxe: Contains everything for a given color.
• Complete: Contains everything colors, every variations.

I’m open to suggestions, please tell me what you want, I hope this gave everyone an insight in what I have been going through 🙂

I’ve put the coding on the side for a bit. Since Monday I’ve been working on cleaning up my latex production chain. The main reason being that I would like to return to clothes production. I’m especially subject to burnout, so being able to switch to another project for a while would be beneficial.

Monday and Tuesday have been pretty full, but i kept scraping over and over my cleanup attempts on the SL avatar model I’m using. So that’s two days wasted at starting over and over.

For years I’ve been using a ruth shape to do ray tracing. Obviously you can already see a problem there.:I do not look like Ruth, and neither does most SL users. Because of this, I’m now building my toolchain around my own SL shape and skin. This way, what I see in my preview window will actually match what I will get.

It is now Wednesday evening and the different 3D models are ready for work. I still need to do a few tweaks on the “detail” model and finish converting the workspace to metric values, instead of “made up on the spot”.

I would love to include a few screenshots, but there really isn’t much to show.