May 28, 2010

New Releases: Forest Nymph Outfit + AO (Inga Wind & Ruy Bury)

Now for something a little different. Unless you've been living in a cave (virtual or otherwise), you know I'm a huge fan of Inga Wind. She makes some of the most complex and interesting outfits in Second Life -- especially if your tastes lean towards cocktail or "fairy" formal. This time, Inga has teamed up with Ruy Bury of CI to offer one of her fanciful "fae" (fairy) outfits along with a really fun Animation Override!
 
So here's the outfit exactly as it comes in the box -- complete with flapping wings, fanciful formal hair with foresty twigs for a crown and matching sculpty pumps. The only thing not included is the skin or shape. Since I was in an elfin mood, I went to Chakryn Forest to take the photos.

The fun really began when I tried out the AO. OMG, so cool! Everything from walking to sits, stands and flying comes out as if you were a forest nymph. Standing, for instance, floats you about 1 meter off the ground while you periodically do random flits, circles and spins. And there's nothing cheezy about these animations -- they are all very smooth and realistic (well as realistic as any forest nymph can be). There are two versions of the AO -- basic ($200L) and advanced ($400L). I used the advanced one for this review and it's well worth it for any self-respecting fairy. Also included with the advanced model is a wearable lady bug and a mushroom with several sit poses. Ohh and as a bonus, the animations are mod/copy! So you can take them out of the AO and use them elsewhere. Woo hoo!

I believe Inga has a group price for both the outfit and the AO together but I didn't have that as of the article writing.

CI Main Store (SLURL)

Inga Wind Fashion (SLURL)  -- Also carries the nymph AO with working demos

May 14, 2010

New Release: Jackie by Inga Wind


This outfit is a bit of a departure for Inga. I'm so used to seeing her wonderful fairy costumes and amazing cocktail dresses that when I looked at Jackie I was shocked! A business casual pants, vest and top set!

What impresses me is the top! The detail in the texture is incredible and does an excellent job of covering over those weird stretchy spots in the mesh. But what really blows me away are the vertical shadows and highlights that give the top a shiny, shirred look without the usual fakiness I see in so many other attempts. The boob shadows and highlights add to the sheen look. Add to this the integrated peplum in the pants and you have one original design that will knock your business casual panty hose off! The top also includes a cute little scarf with a prim bow which you can't really see in these photos.

If I had one small picky point it's that I'm not real crazy about the high belt. Like just about every belt that's on a fabric layer, it doesn't quite look "real" enough. Yet, a prim belt would be impossible here so it's just a limitation of the system.

As usual, Inga offers Jackie as a complete outfit including shoes (matching dark red pumps) and a second "plain" top without the butterfly trim (but who doesn't like butterflies??). Now the big surprise. This one's only $250L! ZOMG!

UPDATE: I have been wearing this outfit out in SL tonight for an hour and have had 3 unsolicited compliments on it!

SLURL to Inga Wind Clothing

Something's phishy with Second Life signatures

After the great phishing exploit of the Second Life Blogrums, Linden Lab disabled "certain features" of the Jive SBS (aka Jive Turkey) software that runs the forums / blogs. As it turns out, those features included some of the most common ones used by residents: quoting, smilies, bold formatting, images (to be expected) and video (to be expected).

Next on the hit list for security was Linden Lab limiting images on XStreet SL to only those served by Linden Lab's own servers. So no more YouTube vids or similar product demos. While none of those really affected me directly other than the royal PITA the blogs have become to use (as if things weren't awful enough), I found that trying to update my secondlife.com profile signature to use an <img> tag failed utterly. What I couldn't understand was why other residents had working active sigs with animated GIFs and all but I couldn't even stuff a stupid static GIF even off of an XStreet listing.

Several of us starting posting about this and low and behold, up pops Yoz Linden with this gem:

Yoz Linden post in SL blogs

So basically, sigs with images are grandfathered for residents who already had them because Linden Lab "assumes" they are safe. But anyone trying to update theirs is SOL. What a crock!!! I'm no webbie expert but from what I've learned (thanks in part to friends Patchouli Woollahrah and Maggie Darwin), it's trivial to replace an existing image with something malicious. It's not just the <img> tag itself that can be used maliciously but the file being linked to as well.

Plus, even if simply disabling sig editing is a sound technical answer, letting some residents have image sigs while others can't is inherently unfair.

On top of this, no one has said anything at all about the potential security holes in "Media on a Prim" (MOAP) which lets those so inclined watch even more pr0n from inside Second Life (she says sarcastically).

OK so again I ask the question, WHY did Linden Lab throw away vBulletin in favor of JIVE SBS (Clearspace)? Oh yeah, the reasons they gave were because vBulletin wasn't secure and wasn't scalable. Yet, as I pointed out here, some of the biggest community sites in the world (with far greater hacker exposure) run vBulletin and phpBB. JIVE SBS doesn't even crack the top 500 for sites in terms of posts or user base.

So let me translate Linden Lab speak for you. "We had no clue then. We have no clues now. We like shiny things. Ooooh SQUIRREL!!"

May 3, 2010

Donut guns, yellow submarines and sculpty ovens!

I've been really busy putting my new store location together so I haven't had the chance to get out and explore SL much lately. But a few nights ago (actually early early AM) I saw my friend Patchouli Woollahra online inworld (@PatchouliW on Twitter) and decided to say hi. That simple greeting led to the exploration of an amazing shop full of toys and gizmos including my newly acquired giant donut gun and wearable yellow submarine plus the results of Patch's sculpty baking in her new oven!

For those who don't know Patchouli, she is a somewhat geeky, very smart, sharp-tongued, always witty, usually blue avatar (cartoon kitty or chibi-robot) from Singapore. I love her tweets on Twitter but really never met her in-world until this little side adventure.

The donut gun!

First thing I saw was Patchouli and her new donut gun. It fires off regular donuts (in a variety of flavors) plus the occasional giant donut. Patch says she was looking for giant police to use it on but I don't know if she found any.Anyway here's how every fembot should model their weapons:
 
Sorry that the whites are a little blown out. I had the studio lights on and should have turned them off for this photo. A little bit of color shift to the green side but then if I tweak it back blue -- ick. Ohhh well. (Sorry girl, you look much better than this but due to the big crash, the retake wasn't going to happen.)

S2 Store

So next up was my visit to the store that offers this silly thing. It's a group gift at the S2 store (links are SLURLs) -- home to mad genius sTwo Acker who makes all sorts of strange and fun things. The TP is a landing point so you'll need to cross the two bridges and go to the basement looking store. Join the subscribe-o-matic group in the front of the shop and get your gun for free!


Now here's where it really gets fun. The store is not only the shop for some amazing SL toys and tools, it's also the demo for the creator's "SLRail" system which is sort of like a kids train set you can build from parts. There are several jump-on points but be warned that they take you deep into another sim and it's difficult to get back to the shop.

So what can you find in the store? How about a wearable ground submarine? Wear it and you're off tooling around above, under or floating on the water. A HUD attachment lets you pick the mode. Very fun and attracted a lot of attention as I tooled around my home sim. Since it's wearable, no need to find a place to rez and ride. Of course, that means there's only room for one passenger -- you.

One of the interesting tools from xxxxx is a knot maker -- you position beads along a path and it creates a rope that follows them. Could be used for jewelry, artwork or other strange build that you couldn't achieve otherwise.

Sculpty Oven -- bake & take

But the most amazing tool of all is the Sculpty Oven! In fact, Patchouli was squealing with delight over it! It turns up to 16 ordinary prims into a pretty good copy using just 1 sculpted prim! I was very impressed after seeing the results from Patch when she copied a small bookshelf and sent the output to me:


Yes, that's 1 prim! Pretty cool huh?

So not my usual type of day in Second Life but definitely a fun one.

April 23, 2010

Jump, JIVE and fail!

Phish out of water!
As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday Linden Lab was forced to shut down all Private Messages (PMs) in JIVE SBS as well as several other program features due to a successful phishing attack that used a security hole in PMs to gain access to people's passwords and account info. The other proggie features disabled include embedded images and vids as well as some formatting stuff.

I wondered why I saw a PM notice in my email account but when I went to the flogs to read it, a message simply said that feature was "unavailable". So did Linden Lab notify everyone up front? Oh no no noooo!. They buried it in the Community section. Did they do a MOTD? Oh no no noooo! Trusting our real life information to the current regime at Linden Lab is becoming increasingly suspect. Now on to the original article....

Jump, JIVE and Fail!
Today's topic grrlz, boyz and furrehz is JIVE SBS, the software platform that Linden Lab uses to power its dreaded blog / forums aka the "blogrums". First a disclaimer, I'm no expert on bulletin board software except as frequent user of different forums and as a beginner/intermediate LSL scripter. So take what I say with many grains of virtual salt. :)

I'll admit I was thoroughly ticked off when teh Lab shut down a perfectly good, working forum at XStreet SL (aka SLX) and moved it to their fancy, shiny Clearspace (JIVE Software) platform. And I was likewise ticked off when they moved the Resident Answers forums over to same. Why? Because the old vBulletin forums were searchable, organized reasonably well, used screen real estate efficiently, had a functional editor and allowed signatures. Plus they were in a "standard" format that most other web-based forums use. You didn't have to learn to drive the car all over again.

What we got with Clearspace was flashy looking (yeah it "looks" like Web 2.0) but offered nothing more usable and in fact gave us broken search, an editor from hell (jumping cursor, no multiple quoting, random indenting, no embedded spell check, etc.), took up huge amounts of screen real estate for minimal content, no signatures, no real thread tools, poor organization, reduced readability, etc., etc.

And of course, when asked why Linden Lab moved to Clearspace in the first place, we were told that vBulletin simply wasn't "scalable" or "capable enough" to power the new, improved SecondLife.com. (The fact that some of the largest web bulletin board sites in the world use vBulletin seems to escape Teh Lab -- more on this later.)

The failed upgrade.

Needless to say, thinking the blogrums couldn't get any worse, most of us SL'ers were eagerly looking forward to the long promised upgrade to the second generation platform, JIVE SBS ("SBS" = Social Business Software). We were told it would address many of the usability issues, fix bugs, improve speed, yada yada.

And what happened? JIVE SBS got installed and just about everything went to hell. Let's see:
  • search is worse than ever
  • editor is still borked -- jumping cursor, broken quotes, broken indent, HTML no longer works
  • can't edit (change) your own post once posted
  • serious security flaws that exposed real life email addresses and apparently, for some, their real life names.
  • history for many was deleted
  • password integration was used from XStreet SL but doesn't translate correctly to the blogs so you don't stay logged in
  • many residents can no longer login period and are now forced to using alts to post
  • logins treat "Snickers Snook" and "snickers Snook" and "snickers snook" as separate accounts
  • recent activity is blanked
  • response has slowed down dramatically -- sometimes taking minutes for new pages of posts to display
And yesterday, we got this acknowledgment by Wallace Linden of the problems:
Thanks, everyone, for your patience while we continue to iron out the upgrade to our blogs and forums software. We're actively working on the issues that have been brought up in this thread (as well as others we've uncovered) and have already begun pushing fixes to the software. Each of these, of course, requires additional testing, so you won't see all the bug fixes all at once, but you will start to see the effects of things over the next few days and early next week, and going forward from there. It has definitely helped to have people reporting these bugs to us. Again, thanks for your patience, and thanks as well for your feedback.
Another JIVE SBS failure - Harmony Central

So once again, WHY did the Lab roll out such a flawed piece of software and WHY are they using JIVE in the first place?? This led me to do a bit of internet searching for other sites using JIVE SBS. While my search wasn't real productive (hey, there aren't that many sites using JIVE), I turned up an interesting one called Harmony Central. It's a very popular bulletin board / web portal for musicians featuring product reviews, user-to-user discussions and user-to-expert posts. Lo and behold, Harmony Central JUST converted to JIVE SBS from vBulletin, much like Linden Lab. Apparently the rationale was similar -- scalability and integration with their other web shinies.

Well guess what. Users on Harmony Central hate JIVE SBS! (Click to read some of the posts.) The level of vitriol being thrown at Harmony Central's management is nothing short of astounding to me. It makes the invective often directed at Linden Lab sound mild in comparison.

They rolled JIVE back and out!

In fact, the hate and rate of attrition from the site obviously became so bad that HC's management actually did something about it. (SHOCKING!!) The CEO announced a rollback to the original forums (vBulletin)!! OMG!! I think I'm gonna faint. If Mark Kingdon ever admitted a mistake like that and actually did something similar about it, I'd expect the world to stop spinning on its axis and look for the immediate second coming of Jesus. Now admittedly HC does not appear inclined toward rethinking their whole JIVE move right now but at least they're "looking" at it. So half the site was rolled back to a previous version of JIVE while the other (most important) half reverted to vBulletin.

What more on the JIVE front?

The next part of my search adventures led me to another interesting site -- http://rankings.big-boards.com/ where you can find most of the large web-based bulletin boards ranked according to number of posts, users and software. Well guess what? Most of the largest BBS are either running phpBB or vBulletin! The largest site running JIVE is Sun's Java forum ranked #748. I guess Sun would use JIVE since it's the only one of any size written in Sun's own Java.

So my conspiracy twitchy nose says this smells like a backroom venture capital or board-level connection between Linden Lab and Jive Bunny Software. On the surface, there sure doesn't seem to be any rational explanation for a company that so clearly depends on user-to-user communication to want to shoot itself in the foot with JIVE SBS. Is there?

April 20, 2010

Microsoft Guided Help - Amazing!

OK, I think I'm a fairly smart cookie -- or candy bar -- but sometimes I overlook the obvious.

Due to a horrific crash and an accumulated slowdown on my PC, my tech friend and I spent the better part of Sunday and Monday reinstalling Microsoft Windows XP and my software. Now I'm back up and running (mostly) with a few things left to do (like install all my Adobe stuff -- ughh). Anyway, after the install, I couldn't figure out what happened to my old favorite icon -- Show Desktop. It wasn't there. So I did a Google search for "missing show desktop icon". What pops up? This page from Microsoft.

Several solutions are offered including Windows Key + D (which I didn't know) plus an icky script thing which I'm too lazy to do. And what's this?? A "Fix this problem" button. I've never seen that before. Being a curious kitty, I clicked it and got the usual download request for something mysterious called GSA ACW packages.
Hmmm OK, I'll run it. Told you I'm a curious kitty. (Which is probably why my system was so junked up it needed reinstalling. My tech friend was like uggghhh.)

Anywho, next thing I know, I'm getting a guided tutorial on how to fix the problem including a moving cursor, dimmed Windows and highlights. What it did was tell me the icon was already installed and activated my Quick Launch bar (see I really do sometimes miss the obvious). Yay! It was very cool watching it do all this automagically while showing each step. So Microsoft, you have a winning approach with this one!

April 6, 2010

Two new outfits - Hope & Black Beauty

Black Beauty by Venusdesign
OK, I admit it, I'm a sucker for inexpensive stuff. When a notice came in from FashCon for a $5L outfit from Venusdesign that looked pretty cute in the photo, I hit the TP limo immediately! And there I am to the right wearing it! What you see is what you get -- boots, skirt, top (with prim cuffs), stockings and an adorable hat that just happens to fit my rather fluffy hair (Pya by Damselfly). Click the photo for a larger view.

My only criticism is that some of the details aren't very sharp -- the buckles on the top look hand drawn and the boots are newbish. But hey, what do you want for only $5L??? The concept is great and it could be the perfect outfit the next time you need a goth girl/french maid look. I also looked around Venusdesign a bit and found lots of interesting looking outfits with much more detail in them than this. There's also stuff for guys including some nice looking suits if you're so inclined. Prices are very reasonable.

SLURL: Venusdesign

Hope in Yellow by Inga Wind

I covered the original Hope outfit in my blog about a month ago and was amazed then. Well I'm even more impressed by Hope in Yellow! I think it complements the textures much better than the peachy color of the original. It also sets off the green leafs in the prim dress much better and has a more "spring" feel. Plus I love lemon yellows which you don't see a lot of Second Life clothing.

The outfit includes everything you see in the photo plus a tiara (not worn), special diva hair (not worn) plus a cute swingset for your yard (note shown). Click the photo for a larger view. Visit my older blog post on Hope to see the hair and tiara worn.

Hope is $1200L regularly but Inga usually has a special deal for group members on new releases. Last time it was $800L

SLURL: Inga Wind Fashion

So that's it for now fashionistas! Next it's back to our regularly scheduled Linden Lab bashing.