Blogger, Twitter, gadget & widget fails

Just now I noticed that my Twitter stream was no longer showing up in this blog. At first I thought there was something wrong with the "gadget" (in Blogger-speak) I used to display it. After fooling around with no luck, I gave up and searched. Lo and behold, Twitter has disabled the use of all 3rd party Twitter streaming tools including my gadget. You have to use Twitter's widget.

OK fine, whatever. So I head to Blogger's add a Gadget thing. Guess what? It's broken. All you get is a pop-up that says "Oops, something is broken." with instructions to try refreshing, deleting cookies, clearing cache, etc. OK, tried all that. It's still broken.

And naturally, when I go to see if there's any way of plopping Twitter's widget into my page directly, I'm totally lost in a swamp of CSS, HTML, macros, etc. in the Blogger template I use. I tried pasting the official Twitter widget code into a likely looking spot but, naturally, it didn't work. Arrghh!

So thank you Google for not keeping Blogger working and not providing any easy way to report bugs.

UPDATE: 

Thanks Ghosty & Peter for showing me how to do this using a pre-defined Gadget called HTML/Javascript. Pretty simple to do -- just paste the Twitter code into it. However, it's totally not obvious since you have that "Add your own gadget" link on the left that absolutely does not work.

CasperTech bans 26 users from vending system

Casper Warden just sent out a notice in Second Life for CasperTech vending systems support group stating he has globally banned 26 users from the CasperTech network, including all vendors and rental units. The users, all related in some way, were found to be selling stolen content on the marketplace.

I IM'd Casper but he must be buried in messages after announcing this since he hasn't replied. And of course, due to SL Terms of Service and the possibility of getting into legal do-do, he's not going to disclose any names.

I find it interesting that he's doing on a small scale what Linden Lab often won't do period.

Nice rant by Tateru Nino

Worth a read:

http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/2013/01/04/thats-just-plain-embarrassing/

I see the clueless fingers of Rodvik Humble on this.

Corinne - winter wonderfulness from Inga Wind

 My fave Second Life clothing designer, Inga Wind, has done it again with a new totally cozy, cute mesh outfit she calls Corinne. I know. All those outfit person names. How does she keep them all straight? It would drive me crazy. (TIP: The first thing I do with most outfits is RENAME outfit folders to something meaningful like "*IW* Corinne in Blue MESH - Jeans, boots, crocheted butterfly shawl top". Often I'll tag them with an opinion like CUTE, SEXY, SEE-THRU, etc. Then I put them into a subfolder such as Casual Outfits under my Clothing folder.)

The textures are very realistic as are the shadows and wrinkles. This is just the sort of outfit one might wear for après snowsports or just hanging out in the lodge while you avoid the bears outside. :)

Shown are three of the colorways for Corinne (large is just Corinne, next are Corinne in Blue and Sand. Also available is red (not shown).

Corinne is $400L regularly and $200L for members of Inga's group.  For what you get (everything shown), Corinne is a real bargain at $200L so be sure to join her group.

SLURL to Wind: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pitreavie/180/230/344

Lalo Telling - Gone From Real Life

December 5, 2007 – December 14, 2012

Today, on Christmas Eve of all days, I happened to take a few minutes away from family hubbub to read a few neglected RSS feeds when I stumbled across Daniel Voyager's blog post about Lalo Telling's passing in real life.

http://danielvoyager.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/lalo-telling-has-passed-away-in-real-life/

Snick & Lalo at SL Bloggers party

I am stunned and deeply saddened. Lalo was a very close friend of mine in Second Life, on Twitter and via his blog. He was one of the most interesting, deep and thoughtful persons about life and virtual worlds. While we often had differing political views, we always had fun whenever we were together in SL.

He introduced me to Soror Nishi's fantastic plant sculptures, the Second Life Bloggers group and a number of other things in SL that changed how I looked at our (often) silly virtual universe. He talked me into getting on InWorldz. We stayed up until 3:00 AM several times chatting. Prince Lalo Telling was also one of my direct subjects in the Second Life Tiny Empires game. I even started calling him "Professor" since he was so damned smart plus after he changed his avatar from a sort of neko hybrid (see photo) to a more human, mensch-like presence.

I honestly had no idea he was even ill. He never mentioned it to me or even hinted at it. He was one of those rare SL folks who, whenever I saw them pop-up online, I would always make a point of saying hi.

Sigh. Namaste and aloha Lalo Telling. You are missed.

Second Life bug reporting - major fail

I posted the following in the Second Life forums (see Group Notice failures). We'll see how long it takes before a moderator removes it to maintain the illusion of a love fest between residents and Lindens.

I really don't know how to deal with this any more. Group notices (especially with attachments) are starting to fail at an alarming rate. I simply don't receive them. In checking the JIRA for the issue (JIRA SVC-1507), I see 409 votes for it with 300+ watching. Yet, Linden Lab has put the issue on "inactive" status which means that no more comments can be added and the issue cannot be edited. Instead, Maestro Linden demands "reproduceble steps" via opening a new issue. WTH?

I'm sorry Lindens but bugs are often a combination of things. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to fix them or take additional info on them. Like maybe it only happens on certain sims? Or maybe it's just from certain groups that contain the letters "W" and "H". Who the heck knows? Or maybe it's just the time of day or general lag??

Closing off comments really shows me how little you value your own bug reporting process -- or us the customers.

What you really need is a "Here's what happened when the bug occured" type of reporting. For example, I was using XYZ viewer, time was 1:03PM SLT, at location ABC, Group Notice was supposed to come from DEF group sent by Avater Y. Then YOU guys can keep track of the commonalities rather than pushing "reproduceable steps" back on your customers. Which is just flat out a cop-out!

While my complaint was specific to receiving Group Notices (I often don't get them), it just seemed the whole JIRA process is now completely broken with comments being frozen, action items moving to inactive, demands for "reproducible" steps and no "easy" method for reporting a bug as noted in my last paragraph above. It's sad really. But alas, I think this is the New World Order as perceived by Maestro Linden.

Death of v1.x viewers in Second Life

SL has been rife with rumors lately about upcoming changes to Second Life grid that will effectively deal v1.x viewers a death blow. Since I wondered how it would affect my personal favorite viewer, Cool VL Viewer, I asked it's developer, Henri Beauchamp about the status. Here's his reply from the CV Forums.

Old viewers (LL's v1.23.5 and older, Snowglobe v1 but also v2, old v2/3 viewers and actually, all current v3 viewers) will cease functioning properly (they will be unable to "bake" avatar textures and avatars will stay grey) after LL will turn off the legacy baking service on their grid, sometime next year. While the new baking service is anticipated to come into production sometime in February (if all its bugs have been fixed by this time), the old baking service will coexist with it for some time (probably at least a couple of months, perhaps more), meaning even old viewers will keep working for a little while.

Ultimately, however, all maintained viewers will migrate to the new baking system, and the Cool VL Viewer will be part of them. No worry.

So the sky doesn't exactly fall in January as some of the notes being passed around would have you believe. Yay! But it does get a little darker because a lot of people are going to be left behind on their favorite viewers that aren't being actively developed any more.

BTW, I would like to thank Henri for all his hard work on the Cool VL Viewer. It's so much faster than Phoenix or Firestorm for me it's not even close. Henri also seems to know more about what Linden Lab is doing than Linden Lab. :P

The question for a lot of people is what this means for viewers that support other grids like OpenSim? As far as Henri is concerned, he plans to maintain both baking methods in Cool VL Viewer to support other grids. Who knows what other devs will do?