User:Which Linden/Office Hours/2010 March 4

• [11:05] Enkidu Linden: hello
• [11:05] Sahkolihaa Contepomi: Here he is.
• [11:05] Enkidu Linden: yay
• [11:05] Latif Khalifa: Enkidu, were you involved in Linden homes stuff?
• [11:05] Which Linden: what's up, hippies!
• [11:05] Latif Khalifa: hey Which
• [11:05] Enkidu Linden: only in the most peripheral way, latif
• [11:06] Xugu Madison: hey Which!
• [11:06] Which Linden: hi, how is everybody?
• [11:06] Sahkolihaa Contepomi: is recovering from an illness he's had for the past two days.
• [11:06] Latif Khalifa: great :)
• [11:07] Xugu Madison: Good! Evil plans progressing to, erm, plan. The day job is quieter, too....
• [11:07] Xugu Madison: How's the chaos at LL?
• [11:07] Which Linden: chaotic!
• [11:07] Which Linden: I think I'm getting sick
• [11:07] Which Linden: in fact I'm sure of it
• [11:07] Xugu Madison: eek
• [11:07] Xugu Madison: get lots of sleep!
• [11:07] Which Linden: easier said than done!
• [11:07] Latif Khalifa: some bug jumped from the code to organic? :P
• [11:07] Sahkolihaa Contepomi: LOL.
• [11:08] Xugu Madison: It's good that the chaos is chaotic, though. If it was strawberry-like, I'd have questions
• [11:08] Enkidu Linden: that'd be delicious!
• [11:08] Which Linden: the Lab wil never be a neat and tidy organization
• [11:08] Which Linden: I've always been amazed at how stable communities are
• [11:09] Which Linden: Even as their membership cahnges
• [11:09] Xugu Madison: raises an eyebrow "We're comparing to nitro glycerine,right?"
• [11:09] lonetorus Habilis: heyhey
• [11:09] Tillie Ariantho: hey lone :)
• [11:09] Xugu Madison: hey lone!
• [11:09] Which Linden: The Lab is no exception -- even though it's added hundreds of people over the years and shedded some true oldbies, we still have a fair bit of that original semi-anarchist attitude
• [11:10] Enkidu Linden: which, are you going to talk about eventlet?
• [11:10] Xugu Madison: Although more seriously, I suppose yes, they do tend to continue in a similar shape, regardless of the smaller chaos
• [11:10] Which Linden: Enkidu, I could
• [11:10] Sebastean Steamweaver: Hey there Which
• [11:10] Which Linden: Heh, it has been my focus for the past few weeks
• [11:10] Sebastean Steamweaver: me gives Which fertilizer.
• [11:10] lonetorus Habilis: yes, but the lab has also slowly grown more rigid and slow, at least it seems so looking from the outside
• [11:10] Xugu Madison: looks attentive
• [11:10] Which Linden: Hi Sebastean
• [11:10] Sebastean Steamweaver: If I ran over anyone coming in, I apologize.
• [11:11] Sebastean Steamweaver: gives which fertilizer*
• [11:11] Which Linden: Agreed; hopefully it's a temporary binding
• [11:11] Which Linden: So ok good topic sggestion Enkidu
• [11:11] Which Linden: eventlet!
• [11:11] lonetorus Habilis: tries to remove the hoof imprint on the back of his skull
• [11:11] Enkidu Linden: i'm interested!
• [11:11] Latif Khalifa: enkidu is well armored
• [11:11] Which Linden: it makes networking not suck
• [11:11] Which Linden: in python
• [11:11] Sebastean Steamweaver: Hey there Enkidu
• [11:11] Enkidu Linden: hiya
• [11:11] Bethany Zipper: eeek! a talking plant!
• [11:12] lonetorus Habilis: can anyone give a quick sexplanation what eventlet is
• [11:12] Sahkolihaa Contepomi: sees a Poppy.
• [11:12] lonetorus Habilis: -s
• [11:12] Bethany Zipper: A...a..are u a triffid?
• [11:12] Which Linden: The simplest way I've found to explain eventlet is that it is a lightweight threading library
• [11:12] Xugu Madison: I for one welcome our new frond-ed overlords
• [11:12] Which Linden: It doesn't provide true threads, it provides greenthreads
• [11:13] Sebastean Steamweaver: Hey Poppy
• [11:13] Which Linden: Which are better because you can have more of them
• [11:13] lonetorus Habilis: to make a a work more paralel?
• [11:13] Enkidu Linden: hey poppy!
• [11:13] Which Linden: And because they are cooperative rather than preemptive
• [11:13] Poppy Linden: hello.
• [11:13] Latif Khalifa: hey poppy
• [11:13] Which Linden: lone: yeah, to do more work in parallel
• [11:13] Enkidu Linden: i talked zed into using eventlet for something he's been doing after hours
• [11:14] Latif Khalifa: do you have to yeild control manually?
• [11:14] lonetorus Habilis: but without loosing control of order (greenthreads)
• [11:14] Which Linden: They have the strengths of event-driven I/O which has become a major buzzword lately,but you program things as though you're writing standard blocking code
• [11:14] Which Linden: So, no explicit yields necessary
• [11:15] Which Linden: Cool, enkidu, what project? Can you say?
• [11:16] Enkidu Linden: i want to! but he'd like some time to incubate it
• [11:16] lonetorus Habilis: whitch, i suppose you are involved in the xstreet and sl balance merge?
• [11:16] Which Linden: lone: well I consulted on that but didn't work on it directly
• [11:16] Which Linden: I don't even know if it's done or not
• [11:16] Which Linden: is it?
• [11:16] Xugu Madison: Still a work in progress I believe
• [11:16] lonetorus Habilis: last night the half way merge was made public
• [11:17] Enkidu Linden: they just deployed a bunch of xstreet L$ stuff
• [11:17] Latif Khalifa: no, only the bit where you can transfer money on the web from one account to another
• [11:17] Poppy Linden: already?
• [11:17] lonetorus Habilis: that is, no more xstreet terminals, now you can move money in and out of xstreet from the web page
• [11:17] Poppy Linden: that's cool
• [11:17] Which Linden: yeah; that's what I expected
• [11:17] Which Linden: and then soon you won't need to move L$ at all
• [11:18] Which Linden: where "soon" is a unit of time that is longer than you think
• [11:18] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [11:18] lonetorus Habilis: yeah, seems they are giving ppl that have a terminal some time to adjust and chnage it for one of the new xstreet mockup terminals instead (basically a advertising board)
• [11:18] Latif Khalifa: i deleted mine since Pink told me it cost them $5 USD a year to keep one freebie there ;)
• [11:19] Which Linden: huge!
• [11:19] Xugu Madison: needs to get around to make a freebie-only site. Right after he gets some sleep
• [11:19] lonetorus Habilis: and what is the cost to the land owner to have a terminal on their land ? ;)
• [11:20] Which Linden: what's the revenue stream for such a site?
• [11:20] Which Linden: ads?
• [11:20] Xugu Madison: Which: esteem
• [11:20] lonetorus Habilis: so maybe you could ask LL for rent,
• [11:20] Enkidu Linden: glory!
• [11:20] Latif Khalifa: it's a difficult thing to do, since LL does not really want to provide facilities for such a site.
• [11:20] Latif Khalifa: Like OpenID provider
• [11:21] Xugu Madison: seriously, same revenue stream for most of the stuff I do with SL. While I sell scripts, they're not even in the same ballpark income wise as stuff I normally get paid for. I just found I ship more if I charge a little...
• [11:21] lonetorus Habilis: huh?, you still have to seperatly log into something like 4 sections of the ll web page
• [11:21] Latif Khalifa: I'd make one for fun and opensource scripts and machines, but without OpenID is a hassle
• [11:21] Melchizedek Blauvelt: People with successful vids on Youtube make about a million USD a year on Youtube just because of a tiny ad yeah
• [11:21] Xugu Madison: nods to Latif
• [11:22] lonetorus Habilis: maybe LL could have google ads on their pages, lots of page views each day ;)
• [11:22] lonetorus Habilis: ...to pay for freebie hosting
• [11:22] Which Linden: I'm sure we have tons of evil ideas
• [11:22] Latif Khalifa: i know
• [11:23] Which Linden: (not implying that advertising is evil)
• [11:23] Latif Khalifa: like guaranteed delivery from Xstreet while the rest of us have to cope with unreliable delivery
• [11:23] Latif Khalifa: that's pure evil
• [11:23] ATechwolf Foxclaw: Text ads was the most sucefful of them all. Popup and flash ads just don't work.
• [11:23] Xugu Madison: Yeah, Which, how's guaranteed delivery for script item giving (or trackable failure, anyway)?
• [11:24] Latif Khalifa: it's going well for Xstreet, the rest of us, not so well xD
• [11:24] lonetorus Habilis: well, we really appreciate lindens who stick out their neck out a bit for the resises, and their beleif in doing things properly
• [11:24] Which Linden: I'm not sure what happened with that; I think we were waiting for something to come about
• [11:24] Which Linden: That hasn't come about yet
• [11:24] Xugu Madison: If you could chase it up, would be greatly apprecaited. I know it came up on the SL scripters ML recently, too...
• [11:25] Which Linden: I'll try!
• [11:25] Xugu Madison: thanks!
• [11:25] Xugu Madison: hey Aimee!
• [11:25] Which Linden: So, back to eventlte
• [11:25] lonetorus Habilis: heyhey aimee
• [11:25] Latif Khalifa: just try to be less evil and give us with in world vendors the same ability as the one planned for xstreet
• [11:25] Aimee Linden: hi :)
• [11:25] Latif Khalifa: if possible :)
• [11:26] Latif Khalifa: hey Aimee
• [11:26] Enkidu Linden: hey aimee!
• [11:26] Which Linden: aimeeeeeee!
• [11:26] lonetorus Habilis: yes, indeed, what about the eventlet
• [11:26] Which Linden: It's going to hit 1.0 soon!
• [11:26] Which Linden: Probably not this week or next, but, "soon"
• [11:26] Which Linden: gotta write some codey code
• [11:27] Which Linden: gotta get it passing its tests on Windows
• [11:27] Which Linden: better database support
• [11:27] lonetorus Habilis: did you say where it fits into the sl jigsaw puzzle?
• [11:27] Which Linden: and then, BOOM
• [11:27] Which Linden: It's a tool
• [11:27] Enkidu Linden: how's the unit test coverage?
• [11:27] Which Linden: Unit test coverage i at 80%
• [11:27] Which Linden: which ain't bad given how much platform-specific code is in there
• [11:27] Enkidu Linden: that's awesome
• [11:28] Xugu Madison: That really is!
• [11:28] Which Linden: I wrote about it here: [1]
• [11:28] Latif Khalifa: platform, as in different unixish things? last time i cheched it didn't work on windows ata ll
• [11:29] Which Linden: Latif: when was that? The tip works pretty well on Windows now (wa a bug in the last release that broke it)
• [11:29] Latif Khalifa: i was trying to get pyogp working
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: could be that it has issues with python 2.6?
• [11:31] Which Linden: should work better on 2.6
• [11:31] Which Linden: installing greenlet is generally the hardest part
• [11:31] Which Linden: which I'm hoping that ambroff can help address with binary packages
• [11:32] Latif Khalifa: i'll give it another try then
• [11:33] Which Linden: The project has progressed from "any problem you experience is probably a bug" to "any problem you experience is just as likely to be in your setup"
• [11:34] Latif Khalifa: interesting. babbage seem to have done similar thing for mono assemblies to implement execution enviroinment for thousands of lsl scripts that run on a sim
• [11:35] Latif Khalifa: co-routine-ish cooperative green threads
• [11:35] Which Linden: Yeah; though the mono thing does preemptive scheduling too
• [11:35] Which Linden: It has to
• [11:36] Which Linden: But yeay, lightweight flows of control are the ay to be
• [11:36] Which Linden: The lighter the better
• [11:36] Latif Khalifa: as far as i understand he inserts yield bytecodes in compiled scripts to achive cooperative part of the microthreading architecture
• [11:37] Latif Khalifa: kind of neat idea really
• [11:37] Xugu Madison: Hoping as scripting improves, we'll see fewer scripts as we might get away from some of the weird stuff Babbage has had to do to get the number of threads copable...
• [11:37] Which Linden: Yeah
• [11:38] Morgaine Dinova: Thanks Sai. Hi all present :-)
• [11:38] Latif Khalifa: hello Morg
• [11:39] Which Linden: So one of the interesting things about Eventlet to me is the development of a community around it
• [11:39] Which Linden: I just wrote a long-ass email to the company about what I learned from the experience
• [11:39] Which Linden: (and Eventlet's community isn't nearly as big as it could be, but it's way better than it used to be)
• [11:39] Latif Khalifa: so are we likely to see asset uploads move to CAPs now that you don't need to start a whole python interpreter for each concurrent uplaod? :)
• [11:40] Which Linden: Latif: aren't they already caps?
• [11:40] Which Linden: I'm pretty sure we disabled non-cap uploads a long time ago
• [11:40] Latif Khalifa: Which, some are, but textures are not
• [11:40] Latif Khalifa: UploadBakedTexture cap was disabled
• [11:40] Which Linden: Baked textures
• [11:41] Xugu Madison: I think I remember Babbage saying he was working on cap-based texture uploads...
• [11:41] Latif Khalifa: failure rate on baked texture uploads is quite high, i was wondering why the CAP got disabled and are tehre plans to re-eable it
• [11:41] Latif Khalifa: somene mentioned that the problem was the need to start another python instance for each parallel upload
• [11:41] Which Linden: I dunno; that seems like somethingto work on
• [11:42] Which Linden: I think that the cgi thing was a performance problem for current uploads, not just a barrier to enabling new caps
• [11:42] Xugu Madison: Latif; or the really fun time when my graphics card drivers ate my clothes, then uploaded mangled textured to the server. That was a fun couple of days before I got rebaked on a sane system....
• [11:43] Latif Khalifa: the particular version of asset upload used for textures is horribly slow on high latecy connections, like from across the ocean xD
• [11:43] Latif Khalifa: that's why i'd like to see return of upload caps for texures :)
• [11:45] Which Linden: totally; the udp codebase is probably not easy to maintain either
• [11:45] Poppy Linden: it's not too bad ;)
• [11:45] Which Linden: So again back to eventlet; one of the things I observed about the process of becoming a strong development community was that it worked better as a conversation
• [11:45] Latif Khalifa: it waits for ack before sending the next packet, for uploads, no sliding window, which kills rebakes
• [11:46] Which Linden: And that conversation was made better by me being able to make decisions
• [11:46] Which Linden: Or someone
• [11:46] Which Linden: I am sad whenever we discuss things here that I would like to change but cannot
• [11:46] Latif Khalifa: benevolent dictator model works well for OS projects :)
• [11:47] Which Linden: IT's inevitable when the project is so large it can't fit into one person's head
• [11:47] Poppy Linden: likewise
• [11:47] Which Linden: Yeah, dictator isn't the important part; motivator is
• [11:47] Xugu Madison: (have to run AFK, sorry. If I'm not back before the end,good seeing you all, thanks for hosting Lindens)
• [11:47] Poppy Linden: it's why i stopped going to the sldev-which-became-snowglobe office hours
• [11:47] Latif Khalifa: you do need someone to be able to cut the endless discussion and make a discussion
• [11:47] Which Linden: make a decision
• [11:48] Latif Khalifa: descission*
• [11:48] Latif Khalifa: yeah
• [11:48] Which Linden: yeah, totally; but on the other extreme you can have a dictator that brooks no discussion
• [11:48] Which Linden: that sucks too
• [11:48] Latif Khalifa: we know those as well xD
• [11:49] Which Linden: also I was gratified to learn how eager people are to work on stuff like this; the goodness of the average human being is quite high in my opinion
• [11:49] Morgaine Dinova: The issue is more about the "benevolent" than about the "dictator". The "dictator" part can lead to forks instead of cooperation." We have a situation of that kind developing in Snowglobe, where Q is behaving as a non-benevolent dictator and refusing to cooperate with the opensource community. And that's already generated 1 or 2 calls for fork. Not good.
• [11:50] Latif Khalifa: well I'm glad to see that at least some projects at LL manage to create a productive OSS community
• [11:51] Which Linden: There are a lot fewer restrictions on Eventlet than on the viewer, it makes it a lot easier for me
• [11:51] Which Linden: The whole licensing/contribution agreement thing, for example
• [11:51] Poppy Linden: eventlet has wide applicability outside of SL as well
• [11:52] Which Linden: Yes it's much more sharply defined
• [11:52] Morgaine Dinova: The viewer has very wide applicability beyond SL too. Some of us have been working hard on interop here.
• [11:52] Poppy Linden: we have a few more things that fit that descripton, hopefully they will be available soon
• [11:53] Latif Khalifa: well the viewer is an example on how not to do opensource. people have invested a lot of time in improving it just to find that none of the contributions made it back to the main viewer. you can crash viewer2 20 ways, all of which are long fixed in snowglobe
• [11:53] Morgaine Dinova: Latif++
• [11:53] Which Linden: It's not a good example of open *development* but it surely is open source
• [11:53] Which Linden: Two different things
• [11:54] Latif Khalifa: we must have different definitions of what a good opensurce project is :)
• [11:54] Morgaine Dinova: Which: "throw over the wall" is the worst kind of open source
• [11:54] Which Linden: Other projects to compare it to: MySQL, Chrome, WebKit
• [11:54] Poppy Linden: well, the main viewer has a very bizarre code inclusion path at the moment
• [11:55] Poppy Linden: I'm not sure what the plan is or if it's going to move back to the 1.x style of roll-ins; i am sorry to say i don't have much insight into the viewer at all
• [11:56] Which Linden: Yeah me neither
• [11:56] Poppy Linden: but generally it takes release cycles to include patches, and there plain haven't been any
• [11:56] Which Linden: We really really want to be more open about it
• [11:56] Latif Khalifa: well a lot of people are sad to see LL backtrack on OSS community with closing the source of the main viewer, draconian tvp, etc
• [11:56] Morgaine Dinova: Well I think the opensource community is trying to help you, while you keep trying to shoot yourselves in the foot. One day you'll find the target, and it'll hurt.
• [11:57] Poppy Linden: I think the direct correlation to release cycles has been lost in the discussion
• [11:57] Which Linden: Not sure what you mean, Poppy
• [11:58] Poppy Linden: Well, how would you even know if a patch had been pulled in if there's no release to see it in?
• [11:58] Poppy Linden: clearly the babble loop patch was pulled in
• [11:58] Poppy Linden: it just took forever until everyone got to see it.
• [11:59] Latif Khalifa: we used to have a public svn of the viewer source, synced daily, before "renewed emphasis on opensource" which in practice meant closing the source of the stock viewer
• [11:59] Xugu Madison: Morgaine, I think I can go one-worse than "over the wall". I nearly threw the code to a project at someone today (old, unfunded project that's creating far more support work than can be done for free)
• [11:59] Latif Khalifa: [2] <- it used to be quite clear what patch got pulled from the OSS contribs
• [12:00] Which Linden: Not even over the wall, just "at" :)
• [12:00] Asterion Coen: hello ;)
• [12:00] Morgaine Dinova: Hi Ast
• [12:00] Xugu Madison: hey Asterion!
• [12:00] Asterion Coen: hey morgan, saij ;)
• [12:00] Asterion Coen: hey xu :)
• [12:00] Xugu Madison: Which, yeah. In a "Enough! You do it. *shut down server* *wander off*" sense
• [12:01] Tillie Ariantho: Oh, while so many Lindens are here. :P Why do shapes not load often.... BUT load at once as soon as you changed group in the group window? Did some code go into the wrong part? ^^
• [12:01] Asterion Coen: what r doing some awg folks hidding behind the trees ? :)
• [12:01] Poppy Linden: latif, yeah, i'm not trying to defend that decision :) merely that it's hard to tell patch uptake if there are no releases.
• [12:01] Which Linden: Aw dudes, I should go take a nap
• [12:01] Latif Khalifa: I just don't uderstand what business advantage LL sees in going all closed source
• [12:02] Asterion Coen: which again ? :)
• [12:02] Morgaine Dinova: Sleep well, Which :-)
• [12:02] Xugu Madison: get well soon Which!
• [12:02] Poppy Linden: Latif, well, it's open again
• [12:02] Latif Khalifa: I'd argue that LL benefited greatly from people improving the viewer, creating cusom ones that created whole new markets, etc
• [12:02] Which Linden: I don't want to start an argument but I think the idea that we are now closed source is based on a misunderstanding
• [12:02] Which Linden: I'll let poppy argue about it
• [12:02] Poppy Linden: so that's not exactly the question to ask
• [12:02] Which Linden:  :)
• [12:02] Which Linden: take care, loved chatting with you all
• [12:03] Poppy Linden:  :)