User:Which Linden/Office Hours/2009 Sep 24

• [11:01] Morgaine Dinova: Hiya peeps
• [11:01] Slee Mayo: hi morg
• [11:01] Twisted Laws: hi Morgaine
• [11:01] Twisted Laws: hi Latif
• [11:02] Latif Khalifa: hello all
• [11:02] Slee Mayo: hello
• [11:02] Morgaine Dinova: How goes?
• [11:02] Latif Khalifa: heh lindens village getting griefed again
• [11:02] Twisted Laws: yeah
• [11:02] Slee Mayo: it's good training
• [11:02] Which Linden: hey there everyone
• [11:02] Twisted Laws: going good for me
• [11:02] Slee Mayo: hello
• [11:02] Morgaine Dinova: Hi Which!
• [11:02] Twisted Laws: hello Which
• [11:02] Which Linden: did someone say we're getting griefed?
• [11:03] Latif Khalifa: yeah
• [11:03] Imaze Rhiano: hi which!
• [11:03] Which Linden: how come I don't feel any grief?
• [11:03] Slee Mayo: were
• [11:03] Which Linden: oh
• [11:03] Which Linden: hah
• [11:03] Slee Mayo: well, i still see particle
• [11:03] Twisted Laws: cause its harmless grief
• [11:03] Latif Khalifa: it disappeared, some other linden must have fixed it
• [11:03] Twisted Laws: plexus is cleaning it up it appears
• [11:03] Which Linden: plexus is a pro
• [11:04] Twisted Laws: yes
• [11:04] Latif Khalifa: i have my draw disance at 256, i see grief coming from a far far away place lol
• [11:04] Morgaine Dinova: Talking about griefing, Which, is there a Linden with a direct interest in anti-griefing measures in the client? Anti-griefing server-side concerns many Lindens, but I don't hear anything about client-side.
• [11:04] Which Linden: ha ha nce
• [11:05] Which Linden: Morgaine: no specific linden comes to mind, seems like a team sort of effort though
• [11:05] Which Linden: generally if there's a specific Linden associated with something it's both a plus and a minus
• [11:05] Which Linden: plus: single source of truth
• [11:06] Which Linden: minus: that person is going to be stressed and viewing it as a temporary situation
• [11:06] Latif Khalifa: i think most useful thing would be the ability to identify particle owner
• [11:06] Latif Khalifa: kind of hard to find the source as it is now
• [11:06] Imaze Rhiano: you can find pretty quickly partcile source by enabling particle beacon
• [11:06] Which Linden: yeah that would be lovely
• [11:07] Slee Mayo: advanced > rendering > info displays > particles helps to locate the source
• [11:07] Which Linden: in general I'd love for more "find the source of X" functionality in the viewer
• [11:07] Morgaine Dinova: Which: but we hear nothing at all from any viewer-oriented Linden about client-side measures, which is why I was wondering. Eg. we often talking about griefing measures with Andrew/Simon, but he always distances himself from the client.
• [11:07] Twisted Laws: look in old Dale Glass code, he has an excellent Event viewer that shows particles owners/sources
• [11:07] Latif Khalifa: Imaze you can find the object emitting the particle with beacons, but long lived particles can travel far away
• [11:07] Which Linden: like if you could click on a line of chat and see the source (avatar or object) -- seems like something that could be incorporated into Snowglobe
• [11:07] Morgaine Dinova: Twisted: yeah, lots of 3rd party activity, versus none from Lindens. It's odd.
• [11:08] Twisted Laws: hmmm i did that in mine Which :)
• [11:08] Which Linden: I'm pretty sure we do things, like we throttled the notifications at one point (both sim and viewer side)
• [11:08] Which Linden: Twisted: nice!
• [11:08] Twisted Laws: i still haven't figured how to make patch files on windows tho so i'm not yet submitting
• [11:09] Latif Khalifa: twisted, install cygwin, fire up MinTTY and feel right at home ;)
• [11:09] Twisted Laws: ok, i'll check it out
• [11:09] Which Linden: Yeah cygwin == das bomba
• [11:10] Morgaine Dinova: Which: maybe the perception is skewed by not having a viewer-oriented tech Linden other than Nyx/Papi/Qarl to talk to, and they're all concerned with graphics only.
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: i backup my winboxes with rdiff-backuo over ssh ;)
• [11:10] Morgaine Dinova: Periapse is no longer doing OHs :-(
• [11:10] Morgaine Dinova: Peri would be ideal.
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: well viwer lindens are all in stealth mode... viewer02 being top secret and all
• [11:11] Which Linden: Morgaine: yes certainly
• [11:11] Slee Mayo: hi aimee
• [11:12] Which Linden: I am not nearly as in-touch with the viewer team as I used to be; the company expands like the universe and us galaxies recede from each other
• [11:12] Latif Khalifa: heya aimee
• [11:12] Aimee Trescothick: hi
• [11:12] Which Linden: Hi!
• [11:12] Slee Mayo: compartmental
• [11:12] Latif Khalifa: which, i knew there was dark energy in the lab :P
• [11:12] Slee Mayo: like the government
• [11:12] Which Linden: There sure are some strange quarks here
• [11:12] Which Linden: So, while I got ya here could I ask for a touch of debugging help?
• [11:13] Twisted Laws: oks
• [11:13] Which Linden: If you have a moment, log in to secndlife.com, go to https://secure-web20.secondlife.com/my/account/transactions.php
• [11:14] Which Linden: and download a bunch of transactions in xml format
• [11:14] Which Linden: then tell me if the xml is ill-formed
• [11:14] Slee Mayo: ko
• [11:14] Which Linden: is helping enkidu with WEB-1043
• [11:14] JIRA-helper: http//jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-1043:
• [#WEB-1043] Transaction History: (page timeout)
• [11:15] Which Linden: yeahhh! jira-helper!
• [11:15] Latif Khalifa: well i don't have 15k transactions
• [11:16] Imaze Rhiano: I don't like how transaction tags name is changing - for example: "<transaction_1942162612>"
• [11:16] Which Linden: yeah, the new problem is new
• [11:16] Twisted Laws: it came up ok in excel
• [11:16] Slee Mayo: i've downloaded 2 so far, all look good to me, nothing out of place
• [11:16] Which Linden: scroll down to the bottom of the jira, there's a completely separate issue in the comments
• [11:16] Which Linden: awesome, thanks slee
• [11:17] Which Linden: Imaze: agreed about that
• [11:17] Imaze Rhiano: makes parsing of xml hard
• [11:17] Imaze Rhiano: or harder...
• [11:17] Which Linden: Imaze: if you go to the "new format" page the new xml download format doesn't have changing tag names
• [11:17] Which Linden: new page = https://secure-web20.secondlife.com/my/account/transactions.php?uuid=yes
• [11:17] Morgaine Dinova: Which: I like the receding galaxies metaphor ... although it's a bit worrying :P
• [11:18] Imaze Rhiano: ah... sorry
• [11:18] Which Linden: It's necessary though Morgaine; I actually think we'll be better off when the viewer team has very little coupling with the server team
• [11:19] Latif Khalifa: downloaded 70k lines xml 2mb with no problem.... could be php default timeout if it takes more than 30 seconds to gather the data
• [11:19] Twisted Laws: i'm missing how to get them in xml
• [11:19] Slee Mayo: downloaded 2 on the new format page, both look good
• [11:19] Which Linden: latif: oooh good point
• [11:19] Imaze Rhiano: is schema available somewhere?
• [11:20] Twisted Laws: i found it
• [11:20] Slee Mayo: i'm using openoffice
• [11:20] Which Linden: Imaze: not that I know of
• [11:20] Which Linden: honestly we should be just emitting llsd
• [11:20] Which Linden: but....not my battle to fight
• [11:21] Which Linden: actually it's weird that we don't have any streaming llsd formatters; all of them operate on big chunks of data at once
• [11:21] Twisted Laws: hmmm this is all i get... <?xml version="1.0" ?>
• <transactions />
• [11:21] Which Linden: Twisted: perhaps you have no transactions?
• [11:21] Twisted Laws: i get the list in xls tho
• [11:21] Twisted Laws: no, i have a bunch
• [11:21] Which Linden: weir
• [11:21] Which Linden: d
• [11:22] Which Linden: what url were you using to download the xml?
• [11:22] Slee Mayo: oh, sorry, were you wanting us to view the xml via the website? i downloaded mine
• [11:22] Twisted Laws: 5 displayed for today but maybe its not including 0's when i click the xml link
• [11:22] Which Linden: slee: no that's right
• [11:22] Which Linden: downloading was right
• [11:22] Slee Mayo: k
• [11:23] Imaze Rhiano: there was some arguments that using UUIDs as transaction ids is not good - because they are needed when there is failed delivery from some vendor and then customer and merchant are trying to identify transaction
• [11:23] Twisted Laws: https://secure-web20.secondlife.com/my/account/download_transactions.php?date_start=2009-09-24&date_end=2009-09-24&type=xml&include_zero=yes&uuid=yes
• [11:23] Which Linden: Imaze: eh? Isn't a unique identifier a unique identifier?
• [11:24] Which Linden: Twisted: oh ok, will try that out
• [11:24] Imaze Rhiano: yes... but for some dude who hasn't never saw those - they might be first really hard
• [11:24] Which Linden: yeah, agreed that they're harder to red
• [11:25] Which Linden: I was trying to promote some sort of "uuid prefix" idea, but that didn't go anywhere
• [11:25] Which Linden: like, we could display only the first 10 chars from a uuid and it would be "unique enough"
• [11:25] Latif Khalifa: getting a next int is too difficult to scale?
• [11:25] Imaze Rhiano: most of times
• [11:26] Imaze Rhiano: humm... new idea... that I need to workout someday - "easy to read UUIDs" :)
• [11:26] Which Linden: Latif: well it's more that when we move databases we can't guarantee that the ints will remain the same
• [11:27] Which Linden: And when we shard the database then they will duplicate each other
• [11:27] Latif Khalifa: well in mysql might be difficult, most "real" db's have counter types specifically for it
• [11:28] Slee Mayo: no table locking?
• [11:28] Latif Khalifa: is mysql still stuck with autoincrement fields only, and no real counters
• [11:28] Slee Mayo: yes
• [11:28] Latif Khalifa: has not played with it for a while
• [11:28] Latif Khalifa: ah ok
• [11:28] Slee Mayo: if you delete a record, you just have a missing number
• [11:28] Which Linden: I am so mysql-centric that I don't even know what a counter is
• [11:29] Slee Mayo: you can replace that record though...a specific number
• [11:29] Slee Mayo: but i wouldn't recommend trying to reindex it
• [11:29] Latif Khalifa: in most "reaL" databases you almost never have autoincrement field
• [11:29] Latif Khalifa: you have a counter which is sort of faux table
• [11:29] Latif Khalifa: so you would alway say "select nextvar from mycounter"
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: and then insert that value into table, which has a plain int or long field
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: so when you migrate field in the table is static
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: ie no renumbering on migration
• [11:30] Slee Mayo: Showing rows 110220 - 110240 (110,241 total, Query took 0.3322 sec)
• [11:30] Slee Mayo: you can see my gap
• [11:30] Slee Mayo: ..from deleted records
• [11:31] Latif Khalifa: and the countuer itself can be set by saying something like "update mycounter set nextval=(select max(myfield) from mytable)
• [11:31] Latif Khalifa: ^ once you're done with migration
• [11:32] Which Linden: oic latif, thanks for the explanation
• [11:32] Which Linden: I guess you could just emulate that with a real table, bt that would be a pain
• [11:32] Morgaine Dinova: Interesting that JH is adding a key-value facility into Opensim, alongside the RDBMS. It seems to be for colum extension without schema change, which could be powerful. https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/opensim-dev/2009-September/007599.html
• [11:34] Slee Mayo: connection is untrusted, morgaine
• [11:34] Twisted Laws: bad certificate on that site ^^
• [11:34] Latif Khalifa: key value db has been around since the dawn of time and still widely used in from of barkley db4 these days
• [11:34] Morgaine Dinova: Just accept the certificate. Berlios doesn't want to add money to Verisign coffers, and good for them.
• [11:34] Latif Khalifa: or remove s from https
• [11:34] Imaze Rhiano: verisign... ebil :)
• [11:34] Which Linden: there are other root-level cert signers :-)
• [11:35] Which Linden: I thought so anyhow
• [11:35] Latif Khalifa: all money leechers ;)
• [11:35] Latif Khalifa: i get a cert using my sl name lol
• [11:35] Latif Khalifa: they're only interested in the fee, not so much in any actual checking
• [11:36] Which Linden: lol nice
• [11:36] Which Linden: well as long as it matches your whois record.... that's all they need!
• [11:36] Latif Khalifa: godaddy basically checks that you have a vaild email
• [11:37] Slee Mayo: is there a way to get your transactions older than the past 30 days? i've never looked into it
• [11:37] Morgaine Dinova: Oh they send a fax to verify company authenticity ... funny as hell (I was the regular yearly interface with Verisign for one company). It's classic "Security Theater" a la Schneier. Totally clueless staff too -- "What is telnet?", in answer to me explaining how to show that their server was bugged.
• [11:38] Slee Mayo: lovely
• [11:38] Latif Khalifa: i just tried for fun, registered streamgrid.net, and bought a certificate for https://secure.streamgrid.net/
• [11:38] Which Linden: Slee: no, nothing older than 30 days
• [11:38] Latif Khalifa: 0 checking
• [11:39] Slee Mayo: k
• [11:39] Which Linden: streamgrid.net is run by (unknown)
• [11:39] Latif Khalifa: try ;)
• [11:39] Latif Khalifa: whois streamgrid.net @whois.godaddy.com
• [11:40] Latif Khalifa: so now i have https://secure.streamgrid.net/ with totally fake data, they check nothing
• [11:40] Latif Khalifa: as long as you pay $20
• [11:40] Morgaine Dinova: Yup. Security theater.
• [11:41] Latif Khalifa: the whole certificate business is a scam
• [11:41] Imaze Rhiano: you are ebil terrorist! NSA is going to hunt you down! :P
• [11:41] Which Linden: ha ha more like NASA
• [11:41] Latif Khalifa: NSA is using Radegast, I'm on their good side ;)
• [11:43] Which Linden: Heh, so, ok, twisted, do you mind trying to download the xml transactions again and see if they're still empty?
• [11:43] Morgaine Dinova: Nobody is on the NSA's good side, because spooks see demons everywhere.
• [11:43] Which Linden: I heard that it might be intermittent (which will make me sad)
• [11:43] Latif Khalifa: which, do the webserver make direct connections to mysql?
• [11:44] Slee Mayo: twisted might be watching jerry springer
• [11:44] Which Linden: Latif: in some cases
• [11:45] Latif Khalifa: seconf life web sites are very slow in general, dunno why
• [11:46] Which Linden: They're super-complicated is my best guess
• [11:46] Slee Mayo: wiki seems to be getting slower by the day
• [11:46] Which Linden: That makes less sense -- mediawiki should be easy to scale
• [11:46] Aimee Trescothick: they're grumpy at being webservers while the region simulators get all the fun
• [11:46] Which Linden: ha ha ha, also, php is slow as the dickens
• [11:47] Latif Khalifa: yeah there is this small site that does it well... erm what was its name... oh yeah, the ikipedia
• [11:47] Latif Khalifa: php is not slow
• [11:47] Slee Mayo: mine is rather fast
• [11:47] Twisted Laws: still empty Which
• [11:47] Which Linden: ok thanks twisted -- a good repro then!
• [11:47] Latif Khalifa: facebook adds whole sl worth of users per week lol
• [11:48] Which Linden: yeah facebook probably has more than 20 webservers though
• [11:48] Morgaine Dinova: Oh I dunno, I think LL's implementation of IP over carrier pigeon is the fastest I've seen.
• [11:48] Slee Mayo: facebook is evil
• [11:48] Twisted Laws: wasn't jerry,... grandson was showing me his tree frog :p
• [11:48] Which Linden: Cool!
• [11:50] Which Linden: So yeah I'm passing along that url and we'll try and fix the problem, whatever it is
• [11:50] Morgaine Dinova: My experience from various companies though is that the web developers are generally NOT webserver techies, and tend to screw sites up. Dunno if LL is large enough for that ... but the websites sure are slow.
• [11:50] Latif Khalifa: seems per user thoug, i have no issues fetching those xml dumps
• [11:50] Which Linden: Hopefully it will get faster now that the reskinning is done
• [11:51] Which Linden: And people have time to focus on thinigs other than getting that out
• [11:51] Which Linden: Latif: yeah, it surely has something to do with the content of the transaction logs
• [11:52] Twisted Laws: i only have $0 transactions for today ... 5 of them
• [11:52] Morgaine Dinova: It was OK until Javascript became universal. Then the world ended up with non-programmers doing programming, with a predictable result.
• [11:52] Slee Mayo: i think i've bought *maybe* 3-4 things on this account in the past 2 years
• [11:53] Latif Khalifa: well web development has it's own unique challenges... spent 10 years working in the field of web apps
• [11:53] Which Linden: It's possible that the xml download is somehow ignoring L$0 transactions
• [11:53] Which Linden: I think Google is the only company that really understands that latency is really important
• [11:53] Twisted Laws: btw, if i include yesterday, then i get a valid list in download file
• [11:54] Which Linden: with regards to web sites
• [11:54] Which Linden: Twisted: ah, interesting
• [11:54] Twisted Laws: but theres money transactions yesterday
• [11:54] Imaze Rhiano: huh... I can easily use in single shopping spree thousands... lucklily - or - unluckily - latex designers seemm to have achieved their current peak of designs ... so nothing to to buy anymore... :(
• [11:56] Morgaine Dinova: Which: I'm amazed that the Google webbies (and they must have some) haven't destroyed Google as well --- the day that the main Google search box turns into a typical CMS or web portal, we'll know that Google has succumbed to the webbies as well.
• [11:56] Imaze Rhiano: it was pretty intresting to read that googles database have - or did have - single point of failure
• [11:56] Morgaine Dinova: Imaze: link?
• [11:56] Imaze Rhiano: let me try to find...
• [11:56] Twisted Laws: it has todays 0's and yesterdays transaction 0 and not
• [11:56] Which Linden: I kinda feel that a single point of failure isn't the worst design, as long as you know what it is and spend all your effort keeping it up
• [11:57] Which Linden: Twisted: huh so it's not an error omitting L$0 transactions, it's something to do with the dates somehow
• [11:57] Which Linden: That is helpful to know
• [11:57] Twisted Laws: hmmm then i go back to only today and now its working
• [11:57] Morgaine Dinova: Which: multiple hot standbys a la VRRP
• [11:58] Twisted Laws: the one that works is https://secure-web20.secondlife.com/my/account/download_transactions.php?date_start=2009-09-24&date_end=2009-09-24&type=xml&include_zero=yes
• [11:59] Twisted Laws: doesn't have uuid=yes
• [11:59] Morgaine Dinova: The problem with VRRP and related approaches is the same as the problem with backup --- you often discover that they don't work only when you need them.
• [11:59] Which Linden: Twisted : agh, it was probably a cached bad result!
• [11:59] Morgaine Dinova: That's what makes non-SPoF approach and load sharing far more powerful --- you can see all the components working continuously, no need to cross fingers.
• [12:00] Which Linden: Morgaine: yeah, unless your upgrade technique is to hot failover to a replica with the new code
• [12:00] Latif Khalifa: Which, had a problem with your mail this morning?
• [12:00] Latif Khalifa: unfallable google had trouble again ;)
• [12:01] Imaze Rhiano: [1]
• [12:01] Which Linden: Heh, gmail seems like google's weakest link
• [12:02] Latif Khalifa: funny thing is, the actual mail works (via snmp and imap)
• [12:02] Latif Khalifa: its their web interface that goes down
• [12:02] Latif Khalifa: which is funny for google that one bit that keeps failing is the web
• [12:03] Morgaine Dinova: Which: DBs are out of my area, but I think that was what our Oracle guys were doing, upgrade by hot failover. Can't comment on it really, except to say that DBAs are paid too much for doing too little :P
• [12:03] Which Linden: Heh Oracle has certainly made a little pool of money for itself
• [12:03] Twisted Laws: btw, Which, i backed out of it and started over, its working ok for me.
• [12:03] Which Linden: actually a huge pool of money
• [12:04] Which Linden: Thanks Twisted, you've confirmed that it's intermittent at least, we'll check it out
• [12:04] Latif Khalifa: high availabilty is a whole science, i spent some time on it
• [12:04] Which Linden: It may only hold for people hitting the site for the first time or something
• [12:04] Latif Khalifa: there are some very elaborate systems
• [12:04] Morgaine Dinova: Ugh, I was involved with Solaris HA .... still bear the scars.
• [12:04] Latif Khalifa: and then there is stupud outdated legislation
• [12:04] Morgaine Dinova: An HA system that reduces the availability ...
• [12:05] Which Linden: Ok folks I've gotta run do a review
• [12:05] Morgaine Dinova: Cya Which, tc :-)
• [12:05] Which Linden: Thanks so much for helping me out, really appreciate :-)
• [12:05] Imaze Rhiano: bye which
• [12:05] Which Linden: And great discsussion as always
• [12:05] Slee Mayo: np, cya