The next server version, Second Life Server 1.38, is now up on the Preview Grid (Aditi) and available for testing.  Server 1.38 is scheduled to be deployed to Second Life the first week of April.

What is in this release?

This server version includes new LSL features and a look at script memory usage if you are using Second Life Viewer 2.0.  Check out the release notes here, which are a work in progress.

The script memory reporting will allow anyone to see summary data for the script memory used by all objects on a parcel - that is the cumulative total amount of memory used by all objects on the parcel.  Parcel owners will get a detailed list of memory used by each object on their parcel including the ability to track and find the objects or return them directly from the interface.  Estate owners and managers will be similarly able to view the details for the entire region.  Every resident will be able to get a detailed look at the memory used by their own avatar, down to the individual attachments.

The new LSL functions are generally new versions of existing functions with no script delays and the ability to work on other prims in the object.  The aim here is to make it easier to manipulate entire objects from a single script and reduce the need to add a script to every prim.  Many complex systems should be able to use these functions to reduce the number of scripts required and thus reduce the amount of memory needed and even their overall complexity.

An important bug fix.

There is also a much anticipated bug fix in this server version.  The short of it is that we found and fixed a bug that would cause some Mono scripts to sometimes take a really long time to load when rezzed or when entering a region.  The long, and technical, of it is that there is a bug in the Mono version we use that causes what should be an instant and free action (asking mono to load an assembly it has already loaded) to instead stall for about 20ms.  This most frequently happens when rezzing an object or objects with many identical scripts.  We have fixed this in our code by only loading assemblies that have not already been loaded and hooking scripts up to existing assemblies directly if they were already loaded.  This issue is in jira as SVC-3895.

How do I get to the preview?

To test this server version you will need to log into Aditi.  At the login page use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-G to toggle the grid drop down box next to the login button.  Choose Aditi from this drop down box.  Accounts created in the last year will need to contact Oskar Linden in world, in the main Second Life, to get their accounts ported over to Aditi.  Older accounts should be able to access, with whatever password was being used around a year ago, otherwise they too will need to contact Oskar for a fresh import.

Once on Aditi head to one of the Beta Server regions - 98 out of 115 regions on Aditi are running the Server 1.38 beta.  Some good bets are: Sandbox Goguen, Sandbox Island Extension, Sandbox Newcomb, Sandbox Wanderton, Sandbox Cordova, Sandbox - Weapons Testing and the Teen Grid Sandbox Islands.  If in doubt check in Help -> About Second Life for the server version, about 5 lines down in Viewer 2, which should start with 1.38. There is an automated list that tracks regions that are up with their server versions here: http://aditi.99k.org/ADITI/aditi_sims.php

What to do there?

Our greatest benefit from public Beta testing comes from residents doing what we don't expect and from residents testing their own content.  There is amazing diversity in the scripted content in Second Life and as hard as we try we can never replicate all of it.  Content creators should test their products to ensure they still work and maybe even to see if the new features can help them improve their products.

If you find any bugs, let us know!  Please file a Jira bug in the project 2. Second Life Service - SVC and set the Affects Version to 1.38 Server.

Oskar leads our server QA efforts.  To become more inolved check out:

• 'The Second Life Beta' group
  
• The server-beta email list
  
• Oskar's weekly office hours on Aditi, in Morris, Thursdays at 3pm PST.

I'm very happy to announce that, as a core feature of the new Viewer 2 Beta, Second Life Search has been redesigned inside and out to make finding the people, places and content you're looking for easier than ever before. We've revamped the interface, overhauled what's happening under the hood, and refocused our work on Web-standard tools and methodologies that have not only improved our ability to bring you more relevant search results, but also made us faster on our feet as a development team. And, we've been building a first-class Search team--from Yahoo!, eBay, Google, and Amazon--to bring the best of search and advertising services to Second Life. We've been hard at work improving Second Life Search, and we're excited to share some of the work that we've recently completed in conjunction with the new viewer.

Second Life Search, as part of Viewer 2, now includes:

• A New and Improved User Experience: The first thing that you'll notice about search in Viewer 2 is that it's got a whole new look and feel. We've reorganized the interface to be more intuitive and to use filtering and sorting techniques common to search on the Web. We've also cleared away some of the legacy UI found in Viewer 1.23 to create a clean hierarchy of information and actions. One of our biggest goals in this redesign was to make the search interface more inviting for new Residents while still preserving many of the search options that current Residents had become accustomed to. For example, in the Viewer 2 Beta,  there is now only one location for conducting a "Places" search (rather than a tab and a filter as found in Viewer 1.23), and that "Places" search can be filtered and sorted to achieve similar results as in Viewer 1.23.
• A Robust Search Infrastructure: We've also redesigned the search infrastructure to be more robust and nimble. These changes, although maybe not as immediately visible, are a major step forward as we work towards innovating more rapidly and being responsive to Resident feedback. Previously, Search was hard coded in the XUI language of Viewer 1.23; now, search uses HTML on top of Django Web services and can be developed independently of Viewer 2. This gives us greater speed and flexibility as we develop additional search features, advertising products, and bug fixes.
• Google Search Technology: As we all know, Google's relevance algorithms are the defacto industry standard on the Internet. In Viewer 1.23, the Google Search Appliances (GSA) served results to the "All" and "Group" search tabs for years. For Search in Viewer 2, we have expanded our use of the GSAs, and they now provide the first set of results for most search types. (Advanced search users can still access Linden Lab's proprietary search tools through category filters and sorts.) Google alone cannot provide the best results for Second Life Residents, however. So, the Search Team is continually adjusting how the GSAs work in order to provide the highest quality, most relevant results within Second Life.
  
• Enhancement to Classified Advertising: Second Life business owners can benefit from a significant change to classified advertising within Second Life Search. Now, we can place classifieds alongside more searches, and advertisers will have a better opportunity to be found by relevant buyers. In Viewer 2, potential ad exposure (i.e., the number of search requests that serve ads) will increase to 100% of initial searches, whereas in Viewer 1.23 classified ads were only shown alongside search results in the All and Group tabs.  Additionally, we have increased the number of featured classifieds from nine to 12 on the Search homepage (which appears when you click the magnifying glass or type CTRL-F).
  

The bottom line is that the new Second Life Search benefits everyone within the Second Life economic ecosystem--most importantly business and Residents--as it plays a crucial role connecting inworld buyers and sellers. The more that Second Life Search can help Residents, particularly new Residents, find compelling content, communities and experiences, then the higher the probability they will be come active, long-term Residents. Plus, more Residents mean more potential customers for inworld businesses.  So, go download the Viewer 2 Beta, try the new and improved Second Life Search and let us know what you think.

Searching Tips

To browse the features in the Find window (including Search, Destination Guide and Classifieds), click the magnifying glass icon in the Search field at the top right of the Viewer 2 navigation bar. To initiate a search, type a keyword in the Search field on the Viewer navigation bar.

Once you've initiated a search from the Viewer navigation bar, the Find window will open with an initial set of relevance-ranked results. You can then narrow your results with Category filters and organize the list with Sorting options. Your search terms are now carried from one category to the next, with no need to re-type!

Further Reading:

• Tom Hale's Viewer 2.0 Beta Launch Blog Post
• Edelman  Linden's Shared Media Blog Post
• Viewer 2.0 Beta Forum

Resources to Help  You Learn Viewer 2

• Viewer 2 Help Portal (links to everything below)
• Quickstart Guide (SL Wiki)
• Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)
• Release Notes (SL Wiki)
• Video  Demos (YouTube)
• SL Answers (SL Answers)
  

And, if something breaks or  you're really stuck, then contact Support and we're happy to help.

If you have a Linden Home you have probably noticed a control panel cunningly placed on an inside wall of your house. Today these panels will be enabled, allowing the home owner to use the Linden Home Control Panel -- a web page that you can use to configure various  aspects of your Linden Home.

Since the launch of  Linden Homes on February 17, we've seen nearly 13,000 people take up residence in a Linden Home. The response we've seen to the program so far has been beyond even our expectations, leading us to double the  number of homes that we originally made available. And there are more to come! Our early homeowners love having a home base from which to explore the online world, and a safe, private place to entertain and  socialize -- all for no additional cost beyond a premium membership.

One  piece of early feedback we got from a large number of Residents was the  desire to be able to customize their houses more. Partly in response to  that feedback, we've now turned on our Control Panel feature, giving you a range of options for making your home your own.

The exact changes you can make will vary depending on which house you have, but will include features like lighting, curtains, and texture choices for the various surfaces of your  home. Want a different roof texture? Just click! Need to change the  color of the living room wall? Click again! We're hoping that the Control Panel will evolve over time to give you ever more functionality, but to begin with we need to test the basics -- hence this is a Beta. If you have any problems using it, please do let us know.

For full instructions on using the Linden Home Control Panel, click here.

Once the Beta period is over, and the  Control Panels are proven to be working reliably, we will work on packaging up these scripts and explaining how they work so that  Residents can take advantage of the technologies we have developed for this project in their own homes and estates, and no doubt extend them in ways that we haven't even dreamed!

Lastly, as promised, the base textures for  the various themes will be made available to all Residents today. At each of the different Hub areas you will find a box of textures for that theme, so if you want the Elderglen textures, please visit the  Elderglen Hub! Texture kiosks for each theme are available at the following SLurls:

• Elderglen
• Meadowbrook
• Shareta Osumai
  
• Tahoe Springs

We look forward to seeing what you come up with, and finding more ways to help you settle into Second Life. Welcome Home!

Hi, I’m Gisele Linden.  I’m a product manager here at Linden Lab supporting a variety of technical  projects, and today I’m here on behalf of the Scripting team, also known as Team Pixie Dust (see below), to share exciting  news with you. While working on new scripting features, we built a library that allows scripts in Second Life to talk to Twitter on our internal prototype platform. We recognized that this could be really useful to the Second Life community.  And so with the help of residents Cale Flanagan, Latif Khalifa and Strife Onizuka, we converted it to run on the current LSL scripting platform.

What this  means (as you may have read) is that you can now let people  Tweet from within Second Life in a safe and secure way, without having  to set up external Web servers, and without requiring Residents to  re-enter credentials if they want to use Twitter from inworld. OAuth is  an open-source protocol that provides secure API access to login  credentials. This means you can give Web sites or inworld objects the ability to update your Twitter account without actually having to give out your username or password. The Twitter OAuth Library  we created also allows for fine-grained control over which Second Life  objects can send updates directly to Twitter.

New Ways to Share Second  Life With Your Friends

The Twitter OAuth Library allows any object in Second Life to  send updates to Twitter when any interaction you define occurs. What  sorts of applications could utilize this new ability? The possibilities  are endless! But here are a few ideas we think would be cool, just to  get your wheels turning:

• Having a HUD with a “Tweet” button that lets a Resident Tweet out their SL location at  any time. 
• The ability for a vendor to send out updates when hot selling inventory is moving off the virtual  shelves. 
• A dance machine that informs your Twitter followers that you're hitting your favorite Second Life  dance floor.
• A scoreboard that can send out scores and results of games taking place inworld.

Getting Started

To get started with the Twitter OAuth Library for Second Life, check this wiki page, and take a look at this video of the Twitter OAuth Library in action. And an LSL version of the Twitter OAuth Library is now available on Xstreet SL (for free, of course). We can't wait to see what you cook up, and we  look forward to seeing your Tweets from Second Life! And if you are  Tweeting from within Second Life and care to add a hashtag, we'll be keeping an eye out for #inSL so we can see what people are up to.

Why We Call Ourselves Team Pixie Dust

Scripts are lines of code  that enable interactivity with objects in world. They allow us to do  just about everything with all objects in SL, from simple things like  sitting in chairs and opening doors to really interactive things like dancing, flying around with a jetpack, and playing games.

Simply put: Scripts are the pixie dust that brings Second  Life to life!

What's Next? Your  Creations

This is just the beginning of how our magic pixie dust can enhance our experiences both in and out of Second Life. We look forward  to seeing all the amazing, creative things that you come up with. Please  post your questions and creations to the discussion thread below.

In the meantime, we look forward to seeing your Tweets! Join the conversation below:

Thanks,

Gisele  Linden and all of Team Pixie Dust

I wanted to follow up on my Feb 18^th posting, specifically to update you on the concurrency blips we’ve been experiencing the last few weeks.   These blips would occur at regular intervals and mostly impact login for short periods of time (less than 1 minute).  As I mentioned in that last posting, we were focused on some networking issues with our newly deployed Juniper core switches.  We’ve made great progress with Juniper and have those issues under control, but the network turned out to be neither the trigger nor the root cause of the login problems.  The trigger was a non-responsive state occurring in one of our mysql.agni slave databases (aux.mysql.agni).  This database contains session and state information that is called on during the login process, and when it became non responsive, login failures will occur.  The problem would then  “self clear” rapidly, and logins would resume a normal state.  The rapid occurance to the problem and quick recovery seemed to meet the signature patter of a network related event, and with the configuration issues we've been working through with the new Juniper gear, we initially focused our attention in that area.

After more extensive testing and isolation, we began to refocus on the configurations of our newly deployed database hardware.  As part of our datacenter projects, we have been refreshing some of our simulator hardware (all sims that were in the SFO datacenter), and also made significant upgrades to our database hardware – including our key central database (mysql.agni).  When we began deploying the new simulator hardware, we found some initial production issues, which exhibited the same failure mode that we have been seeing on the aux.mysql.agni database hardware.   The root cause of the simulator hardware problems ended up being a configuration where hyper-threading was turned “on.” 

Hyper-threading is an Intel term describing functionality that Intel has built into its chips to allow multi thread code to process in parallel.  In theory, the promise is to provide greater efficiency and performance of a mult-thread application running on this chipset.  Hyper-threading had been deployed on previous Intel chips with controversial results.  We have equipment currently deployed on the grid that have hyper-threading capable chips, but have turned it “off” by default.  However, in the latest version of Intel chips (Nehalem Core i7), which are part of our newest generation of hardware, Intel brought hyper-threading back and turned “on” by default.   We decided to give hyper-threading another go, and everything tested well, so we deployed the first set of new simulators with hyper-threading “on.”  When problems began to be experienced in production, we quickly made configuration adjustments to turn it “off,” and then changed our default configurations to ensure hyper-threading was “off” on all subsequent simulator hardware.  Unfortunately, our new database hardware was deployed after we made these default configuration changes, and had hyper-threading turned “on.”

Last Friday, we rotated the aux.mysql.agni database to hardware with hper-threading turned “off” and have monitored performance through the weekend.  The good news is that this database has remained stable, with no login blips.  Our plan was to monitor through the weekend and evaluate more data (now complete), and we have concluded that hyper-threading was actual the root cause of the problem.  This now means we will be rotating all databases that have hardware with hyper-threading “on,” including the central mysql.agni database.  Look for a maintenance window announced this week as we rotate these databases and, while its unfortunate that we have to cause some additional Resident impact, I’m glad that we have resolved the issue can get the grid back to a stable position.

Woohoo!

This  past Tuesday, we released Viewer 2 Beta to the public. To give you some insight into the work that went into the renovation of the viewer, I want to give you a quick guided tour below. But first, a few important headlines:

• This is a Beta. We're still fixing bugs and massaging the UI based on your feedback, but there likely won't be major functionality changes between now and when it becomes the default viewer. However...

• We'll be going back to more regular releases  from here on. This means more frequent releases (hopefully quarterly),  each with a more manageable amount of new features.

• There's lots  of new stuff in Viewer 2, not the least of which is a new user interface. Also check out Shared Media, new Navigation  controls, and new avatar capabilities like a tatoo layer and alpha textures.

• We have also released the source code to Viewer 2 via our Snowglobe project.

Of course, there's lots more. Please be sure to read T's post and the Viewer 2 Beta Release Notes for all the details, as well as some answers to a few FAQs of the last two days.

Here's a quick tour of how we got here:

Development

About  20 Linden Lab engineers toiled full-time for the last year on Viewer 2. We call the team "The Front", kind of like "The Front of House" at a  casino or hotel, the part the customer sees. We had small teams devoted  to UI development, Shared Media, viewer infrastructure, improvements to avatars, rendering, as well as a team devoted to open source, security, voice and other improvements. Most teams used some variant of the Scrum development methodology. There was also a full complement of QA, UI designers, Product Managers,  Program Managers, Release Managers, and Documentation staff.

We  also partnered with The Product Engine, a contract  development firm headquartered in California, but with most of its  developers in Odessa, Ukraine. While Linden Lab has embraced distributed development for some time, working with our Ukrainian friends was a  whole new thing for us. It's been a wonderful relationship that we hope  to continue.

User Experience

A first-class goal of Viewer 2 was  to improve the user experience, especially for new Residents. We allowed  ourselves to think differently about the UI, and our usability tests with new Residents have showed that we have made wonderful strides. Here we also tapped outside expertise to help us think outside the box, working closely with 80/20 Studio on our new designs.

Resident Feedback Early and Often

We enlisted  a team of Resident alpha testers back in September, a subset of the  "Battery Street Irregulars" called BSI-STU (for "Special Testers Unit").  They provided invaluable feedback, both finding bugs and letting us know when the UI just wasn't working for them. The communications UI in  particular got a major overhaul based on their feedback. We expanded the  Resident tester pool dramatically in January and February to over 100.  Again, we got great feedback and made many changes based on what we heard.

The  Highlight Reel

Here are some of my personal favorite things in Viewer 2. Be sure to check out the Release Notes for the full list of  what is new:

• Shared Media: Being able drag a URL from just about any Web site onto the face of a cube is pretty transformational. Having it work with embedded Flash is a game-changer, as is sharing collaborative in-world documents using tools like Etherpad, Google docs and my favorite (so far) Colorillo. We've already seen some amazingly creative builds and are expecting many more to come. Be sure to check out Edelman's post on cool uses of Shared Media.

• Outfits: Easily changing outfits from the side panel.

• Navigation Bar: One-click access to your favorite locations is a dream, as is teleport history and browser-like back and forward functionality.

• Tattoo Layers and Alpha Textures: The death of invisiprims. Yay!

• Inventory Icons: The new inventory sneaker icon is awesome :)

So Much Code, So Little Time

Viewer 2 is just the beginning of lots  of great stuff underway for 2010. We had to make some painful choices of stuff not to include in Viewer 2 in order to get it  done. Among the thing we left out but are hoping for in the  not-too-distant future:

• More Social Tools: Social  tools that will let you more easily share with friends all your favorite people, places, and things from Second Life.

• Mesh and  Content Rendering Improvements: We expect these will be as  transformational to inworld content as Sculpties, Shared Media, and  Flash.

• Avatar Rendering Improvements: Tattoo layers are just the beginning. We expect to make some great improvements to how  avatars look and behave over the course of the year.

• Continued Work on Enhancing the User Experience: As mentioned above, we ran  out time for improvements to the appearance editor, inventory management, and build tools. And of course we will continue to refine the UI as we learn more. Lots more to come.

Real People, Real Software

One of the delightful qualities of our Residents, especially those of you that frequent these blogs and the Viewer 2  Beta Forum, is your passion. We love that! And clearly we've sparked lots of passion with Viewer 2, both from people who love what we've done and from those who think we may have missed the mark. Mostly the feedback is wonderfully constructive, sometimes it's a little less so. That's OK, we can take it , and we love it all.

But for a moment, if I you'll indulge me, please just share your appreciation in the comments here for the team that has worked so hard to deliver Viewer 2. They deserve lots of love. Your kind thoughts are a great motivator as we dive into the next batch of improvements and fix those gnarly bugs.

And, if you haven't tried Viewer 2 yet -- please do. Downloads are available here.

Thanks!

Howard