User talk:SignpostMarv Martin/Archive 1

Wiimote

I dig your ideas about the wiimote!

This might help out a lot -- and it should work with more than just the wiimote!

GlovePIE Input Emulator The previous unsigned comment was made by Kamilion Schnook

Thanks :-) Another notable reference for the Wiimote itself is Wii Brew

SignpostMarv Martin 07:22, 9 January 2007 (PST)

Thanks!/re: redirects

Hi! First let me say "thanks!" for the great work you're doing so far. Re: redirects/deletion policy (on User Talk:Rob Linden), I'm going to have to give a short answer for now. Using redirects is the right way to "delete" an article. I don't have time to get into detailed answers on this right now, but check out the many debates that have happened on Wikipedia on this same subject. I think I can re-engage in this conversation in a couple of weeks if you need further clarification. Thanks, Rob Linden 10:56, 11 January 2007 (PST)

Thankie, and you're welcome ^_^

I look forward to discussing it with you :-)

SignpostMarv Martin 11:18, 11 January 2007 (PST)

New home page deployed

I've deployed your suggested homepage. I'm also going to leave the template blocks unprotected for now, and unprotect the home page..let's see how that works. Please watch these like a hawk, they're some of the biggest vandalism targets. Thanks -- Rob Linden 14:05, 11 January 2007 (PST)

SLURL

I've created a template at template:simpleslurl. Wondering if we should use it for the basic slurl and move your complete slurl template to Template:fullslurl or something similar? I'm happy with leaving things how they are now as well. -- Baba Yamamoto 18:10, 12 January 2007 (PST)

I've almost finished fixing Template:SLurl so it'll be an all-purpose template with full support for the options.

SignpostMarv Martin 18:14, 12 January 2007 (PST)

Yeah i've seen it :) It's pretty nice. I was trying to avoid having to name variables with mine though. I think you could do it both ways, so that might be the better course. without named variables your template could handle {{{1}}} {{{2}}} {{{3}}} etc..

--Baba Yamamoto 18:17, 12 January 2007 (PST)

The problem with not using named variables is that you have to keep to a strict order for variable placement, which is why I made the template use named variables.

SignpostMarv Martin 18:20, 12 January 2007 (PST)

Could use both ;).. I leave it up to you. I'm happy with my simpleslurl for quick links.

--Baba Yamamoto 18:23, 12 January 2007 (PST)

I'm about to take a lazy option, hope you don't mind :-D

SignpostMarv Martin 18:36, 12 January 2007 (PST)

You're welcome

Glad to see someone noticed my small contribution. I did seem to make a mistake somewhere though, Linden QA employees is somehow filed under Q. I should have made it titled QA Lindens. MichaelFrancis Linden

I would suggest changing the sort order to [[Category:Linden QA Team|QA Team, Linden Lab]]

Also, consider using the new monolithic Linden Lab Employee template, llEmployee.

SignpostMarv Martin 11:35, 15 January 2007 (PST)

Done.

MichaelFrancis Linden

Project:Internationalistion

I'll stick it here rather than a talkpage on the subpage as the latter will probably move at some point! Basically, you're heading into a minefield (I know - I entered it myself some years ago for an another organisation!) and not only in placing the country of Ireland as part of the United Kingdom (a big kettle of fish if ever there was) but also with some of the others too. Languages may be commonly used in a country but at the same time be officially banned which can mean that stating they exist can cause problems. I'd also noticed that for the countries you'd used anglicised versions for all but Mexico, which seems unfair on the rest (though I accept that accents and diacritical marks might become an issue) but that most of the languages had been titled in that language even if the link had still been anglicised. In the interests of the global aspirations of LL/SL I'd suggest that a ful localisation is carried out on all the names (and some countries, eg Norway, have two "Nowegian" languages, so something else to be aware of.) --Alison Wheels 04:24, 17 January 2007 (PST)

1. Don't worry about doing it on the sub-page, if it relates directly to the draft, please do it there :-)
2. I only did the non-Anglicised version for Mexico because I happened to be looking at the wiki page for Mexico at the time. The idea would be to have the native, non-romanized spelling wherever possible.
   • Redirect pages will be setup from the Anglicised spellings to the native spellings for ease of use
3. full localisation is the idea, yes :-)

SignpostMarv Martin 06:23, 17 January 2007 (PST)

P.S. It's not spelled with a z because as far as I am aware, it's only spelt with a z in en-US, and I'm en-GB.

LL:Second Life Terms of Service

Hi...I didn't realize you were going to post LL:Second Life Terms of Service on the wiki. Having two copies of our legal agreements posted on *.secondlife.com websites creates a huge problem for us. If we forget to update the wiki version, someone could claim that they thought these were the official terms. I can ask our legal department, but I'm 99.99% certain he's going to ask me to delete it. Sorry for not paying closer attention to what you were planning. -- Rob Linden 22:44, 17 January 2007 (PST)

Ah, no prob- didn't think of that :-D

Same goes for the Community Standards right ?

Sorry for running with it without checking in first- there is the distinct advantage of being able to track changes in the TOS with the wiki though.

SignpostMarv Martin 06:20, 18 January 2007 (PST)

No worries. I understand the desire to track diffs. I don't want to bother Ginsu with it right now, because he's swamped, but after we find an hire a new general counsel, we can revisit. -- Rob Linden 13:55, 18 January 2007 (PST)

I've added a notice to the top of the LL:Second Life Community Standards article, could you sysop that and add the following to the TOS? :

:''<span style="color:red">This is a duplicate of the Terms of Service held on the main website and as such, it might not hold the same information as the original. Please refer to https://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php if you need to refer to the Terms of Service document for anything important.</span> <hr style="background:transparent;border-bottom:1px dashed red;height:1px" />

I would imagine the shiny red letters at the top of the page would be a suitable method for keeping the document on the wiki right ?

SignpostMarv Martin 14:39, 18 January 2007 (PST)

P.S.: using the wikified version of the TOS, external sites can link directly to a specific section so peeps don't have to go search through small print.

I'm interested in understanding how to sync and/or link this better too — I ran into a similar problem when including some policy documents in the Knowledge Base, because linking to them doesn't provide all the keywords in the body text which people end up searching for. And yet, the website-wide secondlife.com search is inadequate for such purposes.

--Torley Linden 14:30, 30 January 2007 (PST)

1. Harry Linden setup a google co-op search which I've been using for Help Request searches (the one I setup is better for offsite resources)- I'm not sure whether LL would be better off using Google Co-op or just buying a Google Appliance box.
2. It's on my To-Do list to document the LL policies in the wiki, and to see if it's possible to migrate the knowledge base to the wiki.

Advantages of documenting/transferring LL Official Policies to the wiki instead of elsewhere:

1. Residents can keep track of changes to the TOS easier (It'd be more interesting to start off by putting the first edition in, then each progressive version so the changes could be viewed retrospectively as well). The articles could be sysop blocked to prevent fraudulent changes.
2. Residents can ask questions pertaining to each policy on the article's talk page.
3. A FAQ could be compiled from these questions periodically, as a means of keeping the talk page from growing too large.
4. Creative Commons-style "simplified" versions of the policies could be created based on the legal document and the FAQ (who actually reads through legal documents such as these any more ?)

SignpostMarv Martin 08:41, 31 January 2007 (PST)

Community Team Wiki'ing

Marv, we've talked before about filling in more Community Team specific and general community-related information. As you know, I mentioned I'd like to devote more of my time contributing to this wiki. What other areas could we help fill in? Can you please identify some more and let me know? I know terms like "CommMonkey" are more under-the-radar than they should be, so with your keen attention to detail, I'd like to help draw awareness and add to the available information.

In short: what are you 'specially curious about that Residents should broadly know?

--Torley Linden 14:35, 30 January 2007 (PST)

1. Complete staff and departmental listing.
2. Article with hCalendar-encoded listing of Liaison's on-duty times over the current month/ week.- The weekly table would probably be more easily compiled, and could be used as a resource for Residents wishing to privately IM whichever Liaison is on duty, rather than searching the people list for online Lindens.
3. Publicise the activities of the Tao of Linden- that is to say, make it easier (blurb+categorisation) to see who is working on Mono, Havok, graphics pipeline, interesting little features etc. Since MediaWiki has syndication feed support (which seems to have gone walkies- has this been disabled in the back end?), "developer diaries" of sorts could be housed on the wiki, rather than on personal Linden blogs or the main LL blog.

I could probably think of a few more things, but this seems like a good place to start :-P

SignpostMarv Martin 08:50, 31 January 2007 (PST)

1. Thanx Marv, those are great suggestions — I definitely see some opportunities where we could fill in gaps. I think a "complete staff and departmental listing" isn't very likely to be maintained, but what is probable are wiki-active Lindens (like I am becoming...) responsible for including and updating their own listings for the convenience of Residents. I also wish we had an easier way to simply grab info from the About section of our inworld profiles and sync it on here. :)
2. Re: Public Liaison calendar — have you asked Char and Mick (Liaison Supervisors) about this?
3. Yes, this would connect excellently and go very much hand-in-hand. I'm actually surprised when I hear of applicants missing the Tao of Linden — even tho it's linked to from the Employment page. Core principles like these could be, and should be more visible. I'm also aware that the blog has become very busy and is primarily used for news announcements; we don't have an "Asides" format (as is seen on some blogs), so it'd be nice to house dev context for those who are interested in and have the time to participate. For me personally, I prefer an actual blog publishing platform like WordPress, with WYSIWYG editing — I prefer Windows Live Writer.

--Torley Linden 10:38, 31 January 2007 (PST)

1. OSSL/libSL + wiki template + wiki category = a bot that periodically looks up the listings in a wiki category (which peeps add with the wiki template) that searches for their profile and appends the info. Template:SL-hCard would be a useful for this.
2. Email sent
3. Configure/use plugin for WordPress to stop posts from specific categories being displayed on the front page or make use of the domain mapping feature, and create a dev blog at dev.blog.secondlife.com (community.blog.secondlife.com, grid.blog.secondlife.com and tao.blog.secondlife.com might be other suitable extra blogs), including them in the main blog & each other via the RSS widget or similar plugin.

SignpostMarv Martin 11:35, 31 January 2007 (PST)

Re: #3, right now, we don't have this configurability. We cannot install new plugins ourselves through WordPress VIP. :\ Also, those domain names look no less simpler than, say, blog.secondlife.com/community — which could be done from WordPress itself I think... mod_rewrite?

--Torley Linden 09:58, 1 February 2007 (PST)

The issue of using sub-directories for sub-blogs within the WordPress.com VIP Hosting environment is that you'd have to make sure you didn't put up pages with matching URLs.

From a psychological perspective, if everything is within the same sub-domain, you expect it to have the same design, but if each department has it's own subdomain under blog.secondlife.com, then the dev blog could be cleaner & crisper, the community blog could be more watermelony, the grid blog could be structured like and replace the http://secondlife.com/status/ page (since WordPress can be configured to display only the latest post on the front page), so rather than doing grid-related posts on the main blog, and updating them, you'd have the appearence of there only ever being one post- unless you went into the archives.

SignpostMarv Martin 10:41, 1 February 2007 (PST)

Summary of response regarding Liaison duty times calendar article

We don't have any current plans to publish anything like that.

Liaisons can be reached via Help Request for now- or for Live Help group/Mentors in either of those group channels.

It's very important right now that emphasis is there instead of being pinged individually. Also during crisis times it especially becomes crucial as dozens of messages come in to HR channel and if dozens come in directly it becomes paralyzing.

Char Linden

Thanks to Char for providing this! I gotta say, we can't emphasize info like this enough. Good to know.

--Torley Linden 09:58, 1 February 2007 (PST)

Resident's own pages in Resident's own user-spaces

If an article is a work in progress, or is intended to be solely for displaying your own research (as opposed to being an authoritative article), it would be a good idea to keep the articles within your own user-space- as was done with Gwyn's permission for Gwyn's Beginners Guide To Second Life being moved to User:Gwyneth Llewelyn/Beginners Guide To Second Life.

Anyone who currently has a self-written article should consider moving it to their own user-space, especially if it's a work in progress/sandbox article (you'll notice I have lots of those).

If you're not sure how to move them over, leave a message here and I'll take care of it :-)

SignpostMarv Martin 19:58, 9 February 2007 (PST)

Re: Re: Talk:LSL Function Style

I'm not offended, nor angry at you, you have passion and there is validity in your points. Your comments have brought up issues I had not considered; as a programmer I pride my self on seeing all sides of an issue and it is a good thing when people point out my blind spots. I gather you are not found of the rigidity of the templates but I think it can be made to work. I spent a bit of time thinking about the problems you brought up with internationalization, I was thinking we could write some template-templates; they would change the words in the templates (maybe even the names of the parameters). We both have strong wills and ideas on how things should be. When I was working on the old wiki I came to a few conclusions and across a joke. The joke first, "Documentation is like sex: When it's good, it's great. When it's bad, it's better then nothing". The LSL wiki was rank with bad documentation. Writing good documentation is really difficult, technical writing is a profession after all. One of my conclusions, was that "If I see something that needs to be done, when I come back in a month, it still won't be done. So if it needs to be done, I'll have to do it myself." My work is partially driven by that principal. My goal is to have a skeleton for the content finished as soon as possible. When the skeleton is finished it will be easier to flesh things out. I'm not worried about how things look or where they are so much as getting things usable. Sure I fix bugs as I come across them in the templates but if we decided to rewrite the layout, I'd rework the templates. The templates have the potential to save us huge amounts of work. But now I'm rambling. There is a lot more I would say but for the sake of brevity. I hope you will continue to contribute, you have good ideas and don't let me being stubborn discourage you. Strife Onizuka 16:35, 11 February 2007 (PST)