User:Q Linden/Office Hours/2007-10-01

Time	Speaker	Remarks
[7:37]	Savannah Glimmer	Hi Q, Hi Gigs
[7:37]	Q Linden	hey all
[7:37]	Gigs Taggart	hi
[7:37]	Q Linden	got dark while I wasn't looking
[7:38]	Gigs Taggart	hehe
[7:38]	Q Linden	I'm probably not up to doing more than that off the cuff!~
[7:38]	Gigs Taggart	I just got up so it might take me a few minutes to get up to speed :)
[7:38]	Q Linden	yeah...since I'm on the east coast this is easy for me
[7:39]	Savannah Glimmer	Same here Q
[7:39]	Q Linden	I thought that there should be some early hours for people on european time
[7:39]	Q Linden	so do you folks have things you'd like to talk about in particular?
[7:40]	Savannah Glimmer	I've not been to your office hour before so I thought I'd come and listen or see what was on your agenda today : )
[7:40]	Q Linden	well, I'm a relatively new Linden -- about 3 months now -- and I'm just finishing up my, well, assimilation
[7:40]	Q Linden	:-)
[7:41]	Savannah Glimmer	Congrats : )
[7:41]	Q Linden	I've decided to focus on open source and viewer issues
[7:41]	Gigs Taggart	cool
[7:41]	Gigs Taggart	well I've got plenty I could talk about if you don't have any plans in particular :)
[7:41]	Q Linden	so I'll be joining "studio shiny"
[7:41]	Gigs Taggart	In terms of viewer UI
[7:41]	Savannah Glimmer	Would viewer issues include features?
[7:42]	Q Linden	Eventually, yes, but at the moment I'm thinking about some viewer refactoring, particularly around XUI
[7:42]	Gigs Taggart	me too
[7:42]	Q Linden	Although I have to talk with the team about how best to go about that
[7:42]	Gigs Taggart	my angle on that is that it's something the community can really help out with, but we have a lack of details about what exactly needs to be accomplished
[7:43]	Gigs Taggart	obviously all those XUI:translate tags need to go away
[7:43]	Q Linden	heh
[7:43]	Q Linden	I really want to get our translation process worki8ng right
[7:43]	Gigs Taggart	but other than that... kinda lost as to where things are heading. A lot of the community is chomping the bit to get to client automation... I think the automation would be best layered right on top of the UI callback level
[7:43]	Q Linden	the translations lag too much
[7:44]	Gigs Taggart	I don't know if you saw the thing with Gareth on IRC
[7:44]	Q Linden	I know...I really want client automation too. Yes, I saw some of it.
[7:44]	Gigs Taggart	yeah I think that if we do this right, it can be a useful tool for QA too
[7:44]	Q Linden	I love python, but I think the longterm direction probably needs to be Mono
[7:45]	Q Linden	I think that Gareth's work will be educational but it may not be the correct long-term solution
[7:45]	Gigs Taggart	I'm not so sure about that, but if the API is straightforward enough it might be easy to link in multiple front ends.
[7:45]	Gigs Taggart	well "easy"
[7:45]	Q Linden	Hence the reason I was nudging him in the direction of SWIG
[7:46]	Gigs Taggart	in scare quotes
[7:46]	Gigs Taggart	hehe
[7:46]	Q Linden	There are API directions that I think would probably be worth experimenting with.
[7:46]	Q Linden	I'd imagine we'd pick and choose from an experimental implementation.
[7:47]	Gigs Taggart	one concern I have with mono is that the low end computers people run SL on... not sure they could deal with a heavy VM in the background in addition to another copy of mozlib, etc :)
[7:47]	Q Linden	So any work in this area should probably be done in smallish bits
[7:47]	Gigs Taggart	mostly a footprint concern
[7:47]	Q Linden	I have to confess that I don't know enough about the mono implementation to share your concern yet.
[7:47]	Gigs Taggart	it may not be an issue either
[7:48]	Gigs Taggart	just something that came to mind as a potential problem
[7:48]	Q Linden	One of my areas of interest, though, is education, so I want to make sure that there are clients that could run SL on older and/or slower boxes
[7:48]	Q Linden	For example, I'm involved with the One Laptop PEr Child project
[7:48]	Q Linden	OLPC
[7:48]	Q Linden	I hope that a few months from now we'll be able to have some sort of viewer that could run on that platform, even if it's not 3d
[7:48]	Gigs Taggart	hehe, yeah
[7:49]	Gigs Taggart	until they firewall SL for being a porn site
[7:49]	Gigs Taggart	:)
[7:49]	Q Linden	woof
[7:49]	Gigs Taggart	goes for the low blow
[7:49]	Savannah Glimmer	Is there still talk of a separate education grid?
[7:49]	Q Linden	Well, my wife actually works for OLPC, so maybe I can have some influence there. :-)
[7:50]	Q Linden	Savannah, I don't know. It's not "talk" that I've heard, but there's a lot I haven't heard.
[7:50]	Q Linden	Where did you hear that? I can try to find out.
[7:50]	Savannah Glimmer	I missed the meeting about it in world. I can get the notes though.
[7:50]	Gigs Taggart	I always saw the all ages area as an educational thing
[7:50]	Gigs Taggart	if that ever happens :)
[7:50]	Q Linden	It would make sense. There are uses for SL that we can't support, because we don't let people under 13 on .
[7:51]	Gigs Taggart	yeah we have issues there with SL Views and such too
[7:51]	Savannah Glimmer	Yes I see a lot of Pros and some Cons for it. Pros for academics and cons for the rest of us if Educators left the main grid.
[7:51]	Gigs Taggart	Catherine Berry is trying to participate in Views and the Arch Working Group but is kinda locked out of it all
[7:52]	Q Linden	Why is she locked out?
[7:52]	Gigs Taggart	because shes like 16
[7:52]	Q Linden	Ah, right. Yes, ok, now I know why I've seen the name.
[7:52]	Gigs Taggart	she was with us in SF at the meetings
[7:52]	Gigs Taggart	but now that that's over, she's missing a lot of it
[7:53]	Q Linden	Yeah, we know we don't have a perfect answer there yet. It's been a topic for discussion frequently.
[7:53]	Savannah Glimmer	Too bad there can't be a Teen translation of information forwarded to the Teen grid internally.
[7:53]	Gigs Taggart	It's more of a dialog anyway, just forwarding information to them wouldn't be very complete either.
[7:54]	Q Linden	Is she also prevented from participating on the wiki?
[7:54]	Gigs Taggart	I'm not sure about that
[7:54]	Q Linden	I don't know our policies there
[7:54]	Gigs Taggart	the mailing lists are open I think though
[7:54]	Q Linden	yeah, maybe she wants to get on SLDev
[7:54]	Gigs Taggart	but really missing the in-world part I can see how you might just give up
[7:55]	Q Linden	Understood.
[7:55]	Q Linden	Gigs, what areas of OS have you been working on?
[7:56]	Gigs Taggart	Q back to the technical side of things, I'd really like to do something like a work breakdown on the UI Roadmap, making small chunks of tasks that Open Source could accomplish in limited amounts of time
[7:56]	Gigs Taggart	I've been fixing bugs and doing small features to help with pain points (mainly my own) :)
[7:57]	Gigs Taggart	My latest patches are better terraform tools, a more flexible snapshot tool, and a couple others
[7:57]	Q Linden	Ok, I'm listening. I think what you're saying is you'd like more explicit guidance as to what we need and in what order?
[7:57]	Gigs Taggart	for the UI roadmap, yeah
[7:57]	Gigs Taggart	you familair with a WBS in PM terms?
[7:57]	Savannah Glimmer	I'd like to see snap off and enlargement of the Web tab, with browser forward and back tabs.
[7:57]	Q Linden	WBS meaning -- work breakdown schedule?
[7:58]	Savannah Glimmer	(In the profile)
[7:58]	Gigs Taggart	yeah work breakdown structure
[7:58]	Gigs Taggart	http://www.hyperthot.com/pm_wbs.htm
[7:58]	Savannah Glimmer	which would help with your program Q.
[7:58]	Gigs Taggart	(not the best site, just first hit on google)
[7:58]	Q Linden	would help me with which program?
[7:59]	Savannah Glimmer	Lap tops for every child. When you are seeking to run a slower connection or client, using the profile web tab allows for browser use without loading down the system. Its just that a page is so small there it becomes time consuming to use other than watching youtube videos.
[8:00]	Q Linden	Gigs, I've never seen a work chart in that format before. Seems like everyone I've ever worked with has used Gantt layouts
[8:00]	Q Linden	Ah, right
[8:00]	Gigs Taggart	the WBS is the input to the Gantt chart
[8:00]	Gigs Taggart	Gantt schedules the WBS tasks
[8:00]	Gigs Taggart	but with open source, we probably want to stop short of gantt probably :)
[8:01]	Gigs Taggart	mainly concentrate on ordering of tasks rather than scheduling
[8:01]	Q Linden	Is there an implied dependency in those task items I see there?
[8:01]	Gigs Taggart	yes
[8:01]	Gigs Taggart	the leaf nodes are prereqs to the higher nodes
[8:02]	Gigs Taggart	it captures the dependancy in addition to breaking down the tasks into small units that can be accomplished in a day or so
[8:02]	Gigs Taggart	or at least into tasks that are straightforward enough
[8:02]	Q Linden	Savannah, I see what you're getting at. I'm thinking that a thin client probably would be *mostly* browser. But that's just my own thought, not a Linden Pronouncement.
[8:03]	Gigs Taggart	I'm not saying this WBS format is the way to go, it's just an example from the project management world of the sort of thing we are going to need to do to get open source developers working in the same direction IMO
[8:03]	Q Linden	Gigs, have you found that open source can be managed that closely?
[8:03]	Gigs Taggart	it's not about management as much as showing people how we can get there from here, a "marketing tool"
[8:04]	Q Linden	:-)
[8:04]	Gigs Taggart	if we can say "here's how we get client automation in a clean way, and here's what has to happen to get there" then people will be eager to put their name next to the small lists tasks
[8:04]	Gigs Taggart	(that's the idea at least) :)
[8:04]	Q Linden	I see, ok. One of the things we're learning is how best to engage the community. We really do want to do it right, and I think we now have a bunch of people pulling in the same direction.
[8:05]	Gigs Taggart	other open source projects generally do make these detailed tasks lists
[8:06]	Gigs Taggart	in terms of what needs to happen to accomplish larger goals
[8:06]	Q Linden	Ok...I think we're getting there.
[8:06]	Q Linden	Savannah, I see Orientation Station on your profile. Can you tell me more about it?
[8:06]	Gigs Taggart	it's usually done in terms of milestones being the mid level nodes
[8:08]	Q Linden	ok. I'm literally just starting in this area today, so I'll probably have more to say about this in the coming weeks.
[8:08]	Gigs Taggart	cool :)
[8:09]	Savannah Glimmer	Hi Rev
[8:09]	Q Linden	Gig, what do you plan to do once you have client-side scripting?
[8:09]	Revolution Perenti	hello Sav, and Q Linden ^^
[8:10]	Gigs Taggart	The possibilities are almost limitless :)
[8:10]	Gigs Taggart	AIs NPCs, sex bots, etc :)
[8:10]	Q Linden	hi, revolution
[8:10]	Revolution Perenti	lol Gigs , dont they exist already i write bots already touching the code base with libsl
[8:11]	Gigs Taggart	yeah, but it's not easy to package that up and sell it
[8:11]	Q Linden	Rev, how are you finding libsl?
[8:11]	Revolution Perenti	well its not too bad but its missing alot , im really waiting for miller to anounce server code is released under GPL
[8:12]	Revolution Perenti	but i do have question about that ^^ how are you going to release server code with commerical code
[8:12]	Q Linden	I was saying earlier that I'm newly working on the open source side of SL. One of the things I'm thinking about is working on that.
[8:12]	Revolution Perenti	becuase you have wqindlight, havok and many other sdks which are commerical
[8:12]	Revolution Perenti	are you planning to write an alt physics engine
[8:12]	Revolution Perenti	or something like ODE
[8:13]	Revolution Perenti	which is prety much an free open source physics engine , even its not up to specs with havok 4 /5 it does a fair job
[8:13]	Q Linden	Well, yeah...the server release is still many months away because of issues like that. We have to solve a number of things, including distributed trust, and how to handle libraries.
[8:13]	Revolution Perenti	you planning to prepack dlls or libs of your custom havok hehe
[8:13]	Revolution Perenti	look at what happened to vale few years ago
[8:14]	Revolution Perenti	you dont want to make that mistake
[8:14]	Q Linden	We will probably have to do something like that, so that there's a standard API and then plugin physics engines or something.
[8:14]	Q Linden	What happened to vale? That doesn't ring bells with me.
[8:14]	Revolution Perenti	and i do know in the end, second life wont be a game no more it be a platform, look at apache httpd project , we could see second life up there and in the long run the community will help
[8:15]	Revolution Perenti	but personally linden labs right now are very poor in promoting open source
[8:15]	Q Linden	We know, but we're ramping up real fast, because now there are a bunch of us that actually care.
[8:15]	Revolution Perenti	becuause im aways fixing , sending patches to you guys and ticket left open for months
[8:16]	Revolution Perenti	and unassigned im aways having to track lindens down in world saying hey look at this ^^ import plz
[8:16]	Q Linden	Yeah, we know. THat's partly why I'm joining that team. Part of the problem is making sure that what you're working on is what we're ready to accept.
[8:17]	Q Linden	We were just talking earlier about us trying to be better about publishing our roadmap, broken down so that os devs can help
[8:17]	Gigs Taggart	Revolution what is an example of this?
[8:17]	Q Linden	oh, btw, is everyone here OK if I publish this transcrpt?
[8:17]	Gigs Taggart	yeah
[8:17]	Savannah Glimmer	yes
[8:17]	Revolution Perenti	with the new website underway too het grid , open source needs to be pushed , people need to know that the source code is there, open source is very big if its web based or c++ many residnets in world can code , or some have some history. maybe blogging open source more often would help too make people relise they can pitch in and do there part
[8:18]	Revolution Perenti	yes you may ^^
[8:18]	Q Linden	As I get up to speed I'll be blogging more, and you'll start seeing me more on SLDev and IRC
[8:19]	Q Linden	"more" meaning > 0 ;-)
[8:19]	Gigs Taggart	Revolution I'm looking at the pending patch list, I don't see any of yours
[8:20]	Gigs Taggart	Can you send me one that you are talking about?
[8:21]	Revolution Perenti	thats would be great, becuase linden labs pushing really hard right now, look we have havok on beta grid now, mono is matter of weeks behind and windlight will follow and once the server code is released we like to see the community involved too making this stable, i know linden labs rather add new features then fix bugs, becuase most of the bugs are umbrella effects bugs, either same bugs comming up again and again or bugs being reopened and if the community is involved we could fix but linden labs really needs to look at jira more often and not just importing or closing at office hours but doing the same off world and go though them more and get them to a level where improvmenbts in the viewer or server side which will imporve users expierence
[8:22]	Revolution Perenti	there many on there as me or as my alt ^^
[8:22]	Revolution Perenti	and i had to track down rob , ben , torley many times
[8:23]	Revolution Perenti	i go over current open reports and update, patch or close them if they already been solved by LL
[8:23]	Gigs Taggart	Revolution don't forget to use the "patch attached" flag, or it won't get triaged with priority.
[8:23]	Q Linden	Well, most devs would rather add features than fix bugs, but at this point I think I can safely say that LL "gets it" -- Havok is really about stability, and most everyone on the team is focused on stability and long-term growth issues. Anyone who wants to add features without a corresponding increase in stability gets spanked. :-)
[8:23]	Revolution Perenti	awww i never knew that
[8:23]	Gigs Taggart	hehe yeah that might be part of the problem there :)
[8:24]	Q Linden	And we know we haven't been good about importing patches -- we're rather significantly renovating our internal processes to make that easier.
[8:25]	Q Linden	A couple of people like Soft and Sardonyx have been pushing us hard
[8:25]	Revolution Perenti	are there any plans of putting goo fence up a notch too, personally i find andrew security measure dont seem to be all that now , everyone released now how to defeat it, i defeated his goo fence with one line of code you dont have to be no expert in lsl and hopefully havok will reduce alot too with alot of common grifer attacks
[8:25]	Q Linden	And I'm adding my weight to the pile-on.
[8:25]	Revolution Perenti	i bet
[8:26]	Q Linden	We're all optimistic that havok is gonna make life a lot harder for the griefers.
[8:26]	Gigs Taggart	I have a concern there Q :)
[8:26]	Q Linden	Gigs: which "there"?
[8:26]	Gigs Taggart	Right now if you physics lag a region it falls down and rolls back, in Havok4 you could make a region sit at 0.1 TD forever.
[8:27]	Gigs Taggart	I'm not sure that is a net improvement per-se
[8:27]	Q Linden	Well...rollback creates significant problems with inventory loss
[8:27]	Revolution Perenti	are there plans of implementing more of havok features down the line , shame to pay a huge costs in there licence and not add all the benfits of havok, like ragdoll, hinge and joint movements and just wrapping basic physics we have now with the stablity of sl physics
[8:27]	Q Linden	So we really hate to rollback.
[8:27]	Revolution Perenti	so much could be done , and would help residnets be more creative, use of less prims
[8:28]	Q Linden	Rev, yes...but as our residents are fond of reminding us, we need to get the stability part right first. :-)
[8:28]	Gigs Taggart	One plus is even though the region goes down to .2 TD or whatever, you can still move :)
[8:28]	Gigs Taggart	the region doesn't become completely unresonsive at least
[8:28]	Q Linden	Exactly
[8:29]	Revolution Perenti	wow thats a great improvment , i did notice alot of bugs still in beta grid even basic swing effects dont seem to work too great where they would normally under havok 1 or this code we are using now
[8:29]	Q Linden	But this is why we're doing it on the beta grid. Hopefully we can tune things so that even that kind of thing is less of an issue.
[8:29]	Gigs Taggart	revolution yeah basic machines like hinges and seesaws don't work as well in havok4, but I'd be willing to give that up :)
[8:29]	Q Linden	I sit across from Sidewinder, who's been shepherding this project, and he wants it to be right!
[8:29]	Revolution Perenti	its been a really long road with havok, and i can imagine its been really complex adding something like this
[8:30]	Q Linden	That's what beta's for. Part of what we've been trying to do is to do a better job of integration so that we can update the physics more easily down the road. That's caused some of the delay.
[8:30]	Gigs Taggart	yeah, that'll be even more critical when you are talking about potentially open sourcing things :)
[8:31]	Revolution Perenti	well the biggest problem i find with beta grid maybe one of the reasons you guys introduced RC viewers , not many people seem to want to use the beta grid accept when the grid down for maintence
[8:31]	Revolution Perenti	i only use it myself to make sure my products still work ^^
[8:31]	Q Linden	Right. Yagottawanna...which is fine. We don't want the whole world in there, just those willing to put up with a little pain.
[8:32]	Q Linden	So it's 8:30, and I've got to run. ANy last remarks?
[8:32]	Gigs Taggart	HIPPOS!
[8:32]	Q Linden	lol
[8:32]	Savannah Glimmer	Nice meeting you Q
[8:32]	Revolution Perenti	we know that , but even beta grid not many people are aware , feature like this are major get them to try it , there are many developers in world, like you say we create the world , you guys just give us the tools ^^
[8:32]	Q Linden	That's what we're after. Thank you all for coming. Pass the word!
[8:33]	Revolution Perenti	not at all but thanks for your hard work
[8:33]	Revolution Perenti	we have faith in you guys , good comes to those who wait
[8:33]	Savannah Glimmer	: )
[8:33]	Q Linden	Bye!