Having fun last night at the Dark Eden party in the Olive sim.  A pole was open, so I took an opportunity to take a spot.  Etain had some new boots for sale, so of course, I bought them…. 

Maybe next time some bloggers or Plurkers will show up at the next party….

-Veyron

It’s Vint’s birthday!  So, Veyron did a special piccie for Vint.  She didn’t want any textures, but I think we’ll let the chocolate by….  mmmm…  cherries anyone?

Okay so you’ve been in Second Life and wandering around and noticed that now and then your avatar moves like it’s have a bad case of constipation.  Then you notice that, huh, your hard drive light is pounding away.  It’s because the cache in SL is more or less broken.  It’s helpful and needed but it’s not that good.

Also have you noticed that almost all of the time when you crash, the hard drive is pounding away.  I suspect that the client is not getting data fast enough from disk and gives up.  I noticed this a year or so ago and I “fixed” this on my home PC.  How did I fix it?  Ummm…  I used a trick I use all the time at work – brute force. 

Yes Virginia, with sufficient thrust pigs will fly just fine….  I took four (yes four) hard drives and made a RAID 1+0 strip set.  That is mirrored two sets of hard drives together and then stripped them.  It was wicked fast, at least for a PC.  After I did that I noticed that the number of times I would crash decreased, probably because the disk system could keep feeding the client.

Now, I’m on my laptop, which perversely is faster than my old home PC, except in one critical area, the disk is much slower and it shows.  I’ve been banging my head on what to do about it, and tonight I thought, why don’t I move the cache to this external drive I use?  It’s much faster and it will get another spindle going…  That worked pretty good, and then I though, why stop there?  I know what I need!  A RAM DISK!

Cue evil laughter…

I’ve got 4GB of RAM in this beast (although Vista only sees 3GB because it’s 32bit….), I can spare some RAM for this….  You will probably need at least 2GB of RAM on your machine for this trick to work….

1. You will need RAM DISK software.  Free software for 2000, XP and Vista you can find here.
2. You will probably need to reboot after installing it.  I set aside 320MB of RAM.
3. Set your SL Disk Cache to a directory you made in that new RAMDISK (drive R), I used a directory called SL.  Set the cache size lower by a few megs than your disk size.
4. Restart SL.
5. Enjoy.  You will have to reload everything, and initially while your cache is reloading things will be slow.

Downsides….  There are some downsides.  If you do not “save” your RAMDISK, you are going to need to reload your SL cache every time you reboot.  This software has a feature to load and save images.  This is an obvious bummer.  Have a care doing this and how you do it.

Performance is much better.  The system is now bottle necking with RAM (or the RAMDISK software) rather than the disk.  It still could be better, but this pig now has a chance at getting airborne….

-Veyron

Or is it the beginning of the end for Second Life?  Google, the new 300 pound Gorilla, is now competition.  Meet Lively.  It’s not Second Life by no stretch of the word, but it is Google.  SL needs compeition.  It would hopefully drive them to improve things….

-Veyron

Look around you, it’s creeping up on you.  It’s the kill switch.  It’s in your computer, it’s in your car’s computer, it’s in your phone, it’s in your iPod, it’s in Second Life, and it is closing in fast.  Worse, there is probably nothing you can do about it.  It is the cost of modern living.  Just like society has it’s cost.  We give up some freedoms to have a civil society.  The trick is finding the middle ground between anarchy and dictatorship.  Finding that middle ground is called politics.  We humans enjoy that sport, it’s our probably our third favorite pastime.

The upside to the kill switch is more… things.  Things like Second Life, music, cars, planes, and entertainment.  We do less work and get more for what work we do actually do.

Second Life is a good example of the kill switch.  Permissions on objects.  No copy, no transfer, no modify.  We all hate it.  But if you make anything, you love it.  Funny how that works.

So, I lost an object last night in Second Life.  It was no copy, so it’s a goner.  It was semi-expensive.  I think it cost me about $L1500 in total.  Sort of depressing.  Perversely a computer does two things very well, basic math and copying data.  The Second Life Digital Rights Management (DRM) kept me from doing what my computer does best, make a copy.  It’s a goner now.  Tiessa has a guide on how to recover things, but I felt it was not worth the hassle in this case.

What to do…  Second Life has had a long history of asset disasters.  Minor ones probably occur on a daily basis we never hear about.  It really is unconscionable that Linden Labs has allowed this problem first to occur and to continue.  Computer systems have been designed from the very beginning to not to loose things.  It’s pure laziness or incompetence on the Linden’s part that the asset system looses things.  I’d love to hear the excuse(s), I need some good humor.

What is going to be more interesting is the sim interoperability announcement.  My expectations of this are… low, okay, non-existent.  You’re asking a company that can and does regularly looses things to be responsible not to loose things for more other companies?  Oh and let’s not talk about grid or asset server stability issues.  How can Linden Labs support more grids as the asset server of them all?

I do realize that with sufficient thrust pigs will fly pretty good, except most of the money that would go into the Saturn V rocket to get this pig called Second Life into orbit is going back to the venture capitalists who started the whole thing.

-Veyron

Seems that Uncle Sam is getting into the BDSM line of business.  I thought it was reserved for the airlines, but clearly they feel that the TSA’s security checkpoints are not enough torture.  Now, what I want to know is if I can have my government issued shock collar custom fitted for me or do I have to wear one off the rack?  I mean I need it to be a little fashionable.  I so do hate it when it doesn’t match my outfit.

-Veyron

Dancing with the devil will do it all the time….  Veyron dacing with Codebastard at her opening party.  Codie doing her own sleep deprivation experiment to see how kinky she can get. 

-Veyron

Moi looking a bit pensive in South Gate…  Meow…

-Veyron

I think it’s time to hit the beach!   Oh, look, it’s a red swimsuit for Codie…

-Veyron

Happy Fourth of July!

-Veyron

Yes, I can be impressed every now and then.  Seems that something might be better than Twitter and Pownce, Plurk.  It’s fun.  Give it a try… 

-Veyron