SLDev-Traffic 28

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sldev-traffic no 28

sldev discussions through September 22, 2007

Announcing Certified HTTP Development

Which Linden announced certified http development, pointing to the public subversion repository, as well as design documents at Certified HTTP and Certified HTTP API. Which continues, "The eventual goal is to perform multi-host transactions through an escrow application (needs a better name). Sketchy design page here: Certified HTTP Escrow. We'll shift focus to the escrow application when Certified HTTP is complete. The design document at this point is mostly to give a use case for Certified HTTP."

As a reminder, Which holds Office Hours if you'd like to discuss this live.

Email from pJIRA Works

Email from the public JIRA now works. You can click "watch" on an issue to be notified of changes to the issue, including closure, assignment and comments. If you authored an issue, there's no need to watch -- you'll be watching automatically.

Please consider watching issues where you can provide input, or where you've attached a patch and might want to help push it through and into the official viewer.

Architecture Working Group

Any sldevers who have been attending Zero Linden's office hours know bits and pieces about how the grid is going to look in the future, once it's distributed and running as commonly as web servers are today. During the week prior, Linden Lab hosted the first grid Architecture Working Group, with a varied collection of server and client developers in attendance. This meeting lead to the publication of a thorough overview of the design, and has kicked off a number of discussions and documentation projects aimed at fleshing out the design.

There is now a wiki category for the Architecture Working Group, as well as several live discussions in sldev. The two most notable ongoing discussions have to do with how much of the avatar and agent processing should logically reside with the client software as opposed to hosted on servers, and what DRM and content licensing will look like in the new architecture. Both discussions are still live, and will be summarized in a future sldev-traffic.

For a baseline familiarity with the new architecture, the essential pages to read are Proposed Architecture, Agent Domain, Region Domain, Central Services and Components and Roles. From here, Multiple Domains will start to show how the architecture scales, and why the separation of the agent and region domains is necessary.

Readers who wish to help contribute to design would do well to read User:Zha Ewry/AWG: Desiderata for evaluating the proposed design and the first major section of Use Cases to begin to understand some of the design challenges.

Running the Viewer in 64-Bit

Robin Cornellus asked about the current status of building the viewer as a 64 bit application under Linux, specifically Athlon 64. David Fries stated that he has the viewer running, and posted a patch for cleaning up the build to avoid some copying of system components into the source tree for the build. Callum Lerwick has long been maintaining 64-bit and strict OSS builds -- he says that the viewer has worked almost since release, although he's currently being plagued by a bug that may be/be related to VWR-2303. Robin Cornelius followed up with his own patch against the 1.18.2 source tree -- it wasn't clear whether this complemented or replaced Callum's patch. Robin is still hammering out some issues with advanced graphics support, which others haven't reported, possibly with different graphics cards or drivers.

Eventlet Under Windows

Baba Yamamoto did some work on getting Eventlet working under Windows. After a short back and forth among Baba, Donovan Linden, Which Linden and Tao Takashi, he got it to the point where it was running, but failing some tests. He's posted the test output to User:Baba_Yamamoto/Eventlet.

Joe Linden Talks Voice

Joe Linden came to the September 20 open source meeting to talk about voice. He announced the good news that the Vivox/SL voice documentation no longer carried a contentious license clause, suggested that time until Linux voice viewer availability should be measurable in weeks instead of months at this point, and talked extensively about the future of voice.

As this was a voice event, there isn't a complete transcript of the meeting, however Rob Linden transcribed extensively. Read for lots of great news about potential features, including voice fonts, rewinding audio, transcription services, teleconferencing with VoIP and POTS, and more.

Bug/Inefficiency in Mouse Handling in LLScrollListCtrl

Lawson English found that handleClick is apparently called over and over on a single click on an LLScrollListCtrl. The smallest number of calls he could manage on a single click was nine. On further investigation, he found that if the handler took any significant amount of time to process, the multiple calls didn't happen, suggesting some timing dependency. There wasn't any follow-up on the list. The original message was here.

Beta Grid Temporarily Closed

The beta grid has been closed temporarily. It was hosting a version of the server code which was aborted. It should be open for public use again.

Variable Terraform Strength

"Terraform with DYNAMIC TENSION to turn YOU insto a BEAST OF A MAN" - that was the email that announced VWR-2331, a patch by Gigs Taggart, which adds a power slider to the terraforming tools. It's a simple idea that could save a lot of landscaping time. Cool!

Flycam Support for Mac OS X

Ettore Pasquini implemented flycam support for OS X, attached to VWR-2516, with a lot of the work involving pulling joystick code out of the LLWindow hierarchy and putting it in the LLJoystick hierarchy, as well as moving some platform-specific code out of common code. Ettore plans to do Linux next.

Presence Notification in IM Windows

Gigs Taggart created VWR-1484, which notifies you when the other end of an IM conversation goes off line or returns again.

LLUUIDHashMap versus hash_map

Dale Glass asked about LLUUIDHashMap, a LLUUID hash map that was used only in the LLMotionRegistry, and wondered whether it was suitable for other use. Doug Linden noted that it was a very specialized class specifically for looking up and iterating over objects keyed by UUIDs, but that it's most certainly not threadsafe, nor does it use regular STL conventions.

Warning on Inviting Group Owners

Gigs Taggart created a patch for VWR-442, which provides a warning when inviting a new group owner, as the action cannot be undone.

Thanks for readin'!