User:Which Linden/Office Hours/2009 Sep 3

• [11:03] Latif Khalifa: hey which
• [11:03] Which Linden: good morning!
• [11:04] Morgaine Dinova: Hiya Which!
• [11:04] Morgaine Dinova: Um, where ...
• [11:04] Economic Core: Hello which
• [11:04] Papa Popinjay: Hi Which
• [11:04] Aimee Trescothick: good question
• [11:04] Aimee Trescothick: what the ...
• [11:04] Economic Core: Your RenderAvatarInvisible is on
• [11:04] Aimee Trescothick: lol
• [11:04] Latif Khalifa: he lost his pot
• [11:04] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [11:04] Which Linden: mine is?
• [11:04] Economic Core: yse
• [11:04] Morgaine Dinova: Must have been in some kind of god stealth mode, hehe
• [11:04] Aimee Trescothick: you're currently "Where Linden"
• [11:05] Saijanai Kuhn: wha?
• [11:05] Economic Core: Oh, your halftorus just rezzed
• [11:05] Aimee Trescothick: there we go :)
• [11:05] Latif Khalifa: forgot to wear his pants :P
• [11:05] Which Linden: weird ... I've actually been walking around like that for a while -- must have lost some prims in teleport
• [11:06] Morgaine Dinova: Ah, welcome Which's avatar. Your agent got here some minutes ago :P
• [11:06] Economic Core: Having asset server issues again, eh?
• [11:06] Which Linden: I just assumed it was my viewer glitching
• [11:06] Latif Khalifa: indicent exposure :P
• [11:06] Morgaine Dinova: Well we know there's something odd been going on with textures recently
• [11:07] Which Linden: one of the bummers of this avatar is that the invisiprims covering my humaniform av prevent me from easily werading stuff
• [11:07] Which Linden: *wearing stuff
• [11:07] Which Linden: will actually be quite looking forward to true invisible avatars
• [11:07] Morgaine Dinova: Yeah
• [11:07] Saijanai Kuhn: so talk to Nyx about transparent textures for your avi
• [11:08] Economic Core: Which: It's already supported with RenderAvatarInvisible :P
• [11:08] Which Linden: actually I feel like the design would be better if instead of 'hiding' the human avatar, you simply had the option to have your 'base' be a prim
• [11:08] Economic Core: It just doesn't stick, unfortunately
• [11:08] Which Linden: Economic: eh? Don't you need a newer viewer too?
• [11:08] Latif Khalifa: yes you do
• [11:08] Which Linden: hasn't been following this topic very well
• [11:08] Economic Core: FlexLife Viewer 1.23.4 (420) Aug 4 2009 14:56:55 (FlexLife Viewer)
• [11:09] Which Linden: and what do you mean it doesn't stick?
• [11:09] Economic Core: It's a debug setting which doesn't persist yet
• [11:09] Which Linden: oic
• [11:09] Latif Khalifa: 1.23 shows invisi textures fine, has no way of setting them though
• [11:09] Economic Core: It does work though, those with newer viewers should not be seeing my LL avatar right now
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: if viewer 2.0 wasn't developed behind the closed doors,we'd know if the feature is implemented there
• [11:10] Which Linden: For some reason I thought it would allow alpha textures on the base skin so you could be 50% transparent if you wanted
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: Which, no
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: alpha masks only
• [11:10] Latif Khalifa: so fully trasnparent bits or fully opaque ones
• [11:10] Morgaine Dinova: Economic: can you hop out of your prims later so we can test that?
• [11:10] Saijanai Kuhn: Latif, but still an improvement IMHO
• [11:10] Which Linden: Oh yeah, don't see much
• [11:10] Morgaine Dinova: Wow! Invisibleto me!
• [11:11] Economic Core: :3
• [11:11] Economic Core: No invisiprims
• [11:11] Which Linden: there is a tiny patch of ... something floating there
• [11:11] Morgaine Dinova: Oh, there's a little black core though
• [11:11] Which Linden: don't tell me that's your hair
• [11:11] Economic Core: I unno
• [11:11] Aimee Trescothick: probably
• [11:12] Economic Core: I look completely invisible on my viewer though.
• [11:12] Aimee Trescothick: yeah, it's your hair
• [11:12] Economic Core: ANyway
• [11:12] Which Linden: ha ha ha, classic
• [11:12] Latif Khalifa: anyway, alpha masks for wearables are coming soon :D
• [11:12] Economic Core: 'System Infrastructure?
• [11:12] Aimee Trescothick: if you hit show transparent you can see it's inside your head
• [11:12] Morgaine Dinova: Yes it's hair, highlight transparent, roughly in right place
• [11:13] Economic Core: If I do highlight transparent, it rurns off the invisibility completely
• [11:13] Aimee Trescothick: yeah
• [11:13] Aimee Trescothick: it does, but the black bit is where your head appears when you do that
• [11:13] Morgaine Dinova: Yes I know, but it lets you see where that black texture is, roughly
• [11:13] Latif Khalifa: Which, what's up with the asset server these days?
• [11:14] Economic Core: It's running off an old IBM mainframe with tape reels
• [11:14] Economic Core: and punchcards
• [11:14] Aimee Trescothick: woah, they upgraded it?
• [11:14] Latif Khalifa: lol
• [11:14] Morgaine Dinova: Economic, can we upload the right av textures for that?
• [11:14] Which Linden: I think it just has periodic bouts of bad weather
• [11:14] Latif Khalifa: i mean concurrency is down... wouldn't expect central infrastructure to become more unstable
• [11:15] Latif Khalifa: Morgaine, no you can't, no with unmodified viewer
• [11:15] Papa Popinjay: Snowglobe has renderavatarinvisible
• [11:15] Economic Core: Morgaine: when the viewer gets RenderAvatarInvisible TRUE in Debug Settings, it automatically bakes transparent textures
• [11:15] Which Linden: Yeah, based on no internal information whatsoever, I'd guess that the latest outage was more hardware-lifetime related than overload
• [11:15] Morgaine Dinova: Cool
• [11:16] Morgaine Dinova: Which: moral of that story was "Single Points of Failure Are Bad" :P
• [11:16] Which Linden: Totally.... it's not supposed to be a single point of failure
• [11:16] Economic Core: LL seems to have many Single Points of Failure
• [11:17] Which Linden: It's supposed to be redundant and distributed and all that .... but I don't really work on that stuff so I don't really know how it actually is :-)
• [11:17] Aimee Trescothick: trouble is sometimes you can see the single points till they happen
• [11:17] Economic Core: One database server goes down and the four Lindens of the Apocalypse are running around tripping over cords
• [11:17] Morgaine Dinova: At least that SPoF is now identified. Hopefully. And eliminated.
• [11:17] Which Linden: But I think residents blame the asset server for more problems than it actually deserves, as well
• [11:18] Economic Core: The asset server does appear in the status page more often than most.
• [11:18] Latif Khalifa: we had some real asset server outages past week
• [11:18] Morgaine Dinova: Which: can't be helped, since there's no visibility of the inner architecture.
• [11:18] Latif Khalifa: ie. stuff refuses to rez, cannot open landmarks, etc etc
• [11:19] Which Linden: Yes, definitely some real ones recently, and agreed that it's perfectly reasonable to have a scapegoat when there's no further information
• [11:19] Which Linden: But we are pretty open about our architecture, we've had sessions about how many dataaservers run on each simhost, what they talk to and stuff
• [11:19] Economic Core: brb coke and ridding self ofchewing puppy
• [11:19] Morgaine Dinova: Been a while since that interview in which you gave numbers though.
• [11:20] Which Linden: the what interview?
• [11:20] Morgaine Dinova: Ummmmm
• [11:20] Saijanai Kuhn: (online)
• [11:20] Which Linden: You mean office hours?
• [11:21] Which Linden: I think we talked about them when I wa guest-hosting for Zero one time way back in Da Day
• [11:21] Morgaine Dinova: No idea with whom the interview was actually, but it mentioned the Isilon NAS hardware --- that immediately rang a bell as I know Isilons.
• [11:21] Which Linden: And recently I talked about all the different architectures for our 4 different forms of chat
• [11:21] Which Linden: Oh so not me personally, I see
• [11:22] Which Linden: heh well isilon did a press release about it : [1]
• [11:23] Which Linden: and FJ talks about it here: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/features/blog/2009/01/12/second-life-grid-update-from-fj-linden
• [11:23] Economic Core: So, when is the group chat going to be at least worked on? Larger group chats are still failing
• [11:24] Which Linden: It's being worked on right now; currently people are analyzing stats that the metrics have given us
• [11:24] Morgaine Dinova: Ah, interesting. Didn't see that Which. I'm pretty sure mine was an interview, a host + a Linden.
• [11:24] Economic Core: Still analyzing stats? Wtf.
• [11:24] Which Linden: Stats were only added in 1.27.1
• [11:24] Economic Core: It's been more than a month since the new stats-giving code was introduced
• [11:25] Which Linden: Yep .... stuff takes a long time here.
• [11:25] Latif Khalifa: yeah i noticed that lol
• [11:26] Which Linden: I think one of the conclusions was that most problems are at the delivery end; the message reaches the chat server but doesn't make it to the sim where the recipient is
• [11:26] Which Linden: But I don't know much more than that
• [11:26] Latif Khalifa: i have submitted simple couple of lines patches to fix some annoying viewer ui bugs past december that are still in the pipeline ;)
• [11:26] Morgaine Dinova: Oh cool, didn't see 2nd link either. Mine mentioned Isilons AND mentioned current size of database.
• [11:27] Which Linden: Ooh the current size of teh database! how big was it?
• [11:27] Which Linden: moves hands far apart " this big! "
• [11:27] Latif Khalifa: db dump fits nicely on a 300gb drive
• [11:27] Latif Khalifa: asset storage was ~400TB last time someone mentioned it
• [11:28] Morgaine Dinova: Think it was either 130TB or 230TB, seems to ring a bell. But I'm totally going from vague recollection. Hmmm, wish I could grep my brain.
• [11:28] Which Linden: Probably impossible to measure now that parts are getting pushed to S3
• [11:28] Latif Khalifa: that's assets, you desktop could run mysql db size they have ;)
• [11:29] Economic Core: Braingrep, coming to Brainlinux Summer 2029
• [11:29] Morgaine Dinova: Ah well there you go, if it's 400TB now then that interview was ages ago
• [11:29] Morgaine Dinova: Hehe
• [11:29] Which Linden: Each Linden gets an external hard drive containing the entire contents of the database :-)
• [11:30] Latif Khalifa: and i bet significat % of those tb are internal things like simstates
• [11:30] Morgaine Dinova: Hehe
• [11:31] Morgaine Dinova: Eeek. A new website
• [11:32] Which Linden: That's an interesting hypothesis Latif, and probably correct (though I don't know)
• [11:32] Which Linden: since the stuff on sims is pretty massive, and simstates just copy that data over and over again
• [11:33] Which Linden: Regular assets can be referenced many times without copying
• [11:33] Latif Khalifa: 30k sims dumping state to asset servers avery 10-15 minutes, adds up
• [11:34] Which Linden: Hopefully we have a good scheme for retiring old ones
• [11:34] Economic Core: I imagine terrain would be a load, too
• [11:34] Which Linden: How high-rez is terrain? Probably at most a few megs
• [11:34] Economic Core: I dunno, I can't get raws to display on GIMP :/
• [11:34] Morgaine Dinova: LOL @ new SL website, you give your login details, it outputs an error page, and yet you're logged in. <sigh>
• [11:34] Economic Core: Morgaine
• [11:34] Economic Core: Speaking of website, it would be nice if theXML transaction history was a little more accessible to external programs, like transaction verifiers. Currently have to run 3 CURL transactions, fake an SL login, and fakes a browser session in order to check if a transaction went through
• [11:35] Saijanai Kuhn: saw a 47 TB drive design for under $8k
• [11:35] Which Linden: File a PJIRA! I'm pretty sure that there are lots of dudes assigned to fix bugs caused by the new release
• [11:35] Which Linden: Sai: I saw that too, it was pretty awesome
• [11:35] Which Linden: The software is clearly the important bit about those though
• [11:36] Saijanai Kuhn: remembers The Sider with 10MB for $1k
• [11:36] Economic Core: lol
• [11:36] Which Linden: Economic: how could it be better? Seems that most of the effort is in authenticating yourself.
• [11:36] Economic Core: I had a 250MB HDD when I was a kid.
• [11:36] Latif Khalifa: like filing pjira is going to do you any good. been asking for ages to open up openid provider site uses for xstreet with no luck ;)
• [11:36] Aimee Trescothick: my first hard drive was 5MB, thought that was amazing
• [11:36] Saijanai Kuhn: and used to use HPT diskpaks with 20MB as the ultimate secondary storage
• [11:36] Economic Core: Which: Make it more script friendly, so I don't have to pass in my login username and password. Something like CAPS.
• [11:37] Which Linden: Well, like I said, we move slowly
• [11:37] Which Linden: Economic: like if the login were OpenID would that make it easier for you?
• [11:37] Morgaine Dinova: It's really not hard to make a website. Not rocket science. Shouldn't need community reports and Jiras for basic functionality.
• [11:37] Economic Core: Your OpenID server doesn't like anyone else :/
• [11:38] Which Linden: is reminded of the cantina scene in Star Wars
• [11:38] Latif Khalifa: Morgaine, open id is already there, they just block any use of it
• [11:38] Morgaine Dinova: Ew
• [11:38] Latif Khalifa: not like they have to do any actual work lol
• [11:39] Morgaine Dinova: Great tech, let down by policy. A common story.
• [11:39] Morgaine Dinova: Nothing we can do about it though.
• [11:39] Economic Core: Toiletpaper M's office every thursday?
• [11:39] Which Linden: I agree that a cap would be convenient; it might be challenging to manage its expiration
• [11:40] Which Linden: Like, does ti give out a cap per session, or do you have a semi-permanent cap that's associated with your account?
• [11:40] Morgaine Dinova: Opensim has both OpenID Provider and Relying Party modules. Any of you tried both?
• [11:41] Economic Core: Which: I would definitely be better than my curfrent system, which has to 1.) Parse the login form to grab a login token, (requiring XML parsing) 2.) actually log in, 3.) Parse XML transaction history (the easy part)
• [11:41] Economic Core: all while keeping a record of cookies and resetting the session for each new transaction
• [11:41] Which Linden: Would you want a cap per login (assuming some login method that was more script-friendly) and discarded after the session was over?
• [11:42] Which Linden: Or a semi-permanent cap that was associated with your account?
• [11:42] Economic Core: Semipermanent would be nice.
• [11:42] Economic Core: But the other one would be manageable, as they both have a lot less overhead
• [11:42] Which Linden: I guess the magic in the first one is in the parenthetical
• [11:43] Which Linden: "Assuming you have a thing that doesn't suck, would things suck less?" "Yes"
• [11:43] Which Linden: So I'm not an expert, but it does seem like many of the aspects of the current login that you find painful are also protection
• [11:44] Which Linden: Not great protection, but, a little bit
• [11:44] Economic Core: HTML login forms with javascript that I have to parse to find a login token?
• [11:46] Which Linden: Yep, the login token protects us against DDOS from someone continuously POSTing to the page
• [11:46] Which Linden: Also makes it more expensive for an attacker to brute-force passwords
• [11:47] Economic Core: You may be misinterpreting a very busy business that has to verify all transactions as a DDoS.
• [11:47] Which Linden: Just DOS, not DDOS
• [11:47] Which Linden: Um, well it's a passive protection not an active one
• [11:48] Which Linden: As in, a true attacker would find it computationally more difficult to pull off an attack because of this measure
• [11:48] Economic Core: True.
• [11:49] Economic Core: But a less-expensive system for valid scripts would be easier on some of us.
• [11:49] Economic Core: And not to mention on the servers that run those scripts
• [11:49] Which Linden: Certainly
• [11:50] Which Linden: I'll write the semi-permanent cap idea up, see if I can see any flaws in it
• [11:51] Economic Core: I'd be happy with a CAP I have to grab each time I want to verify a transaction, would certainly be better than pretending to be a browser with CURL.
• [11:51] Morgaine Dinova: Kinda misses the point that the only reason passwords can be brute forced is because you HAVE passwords. When the login is based on a cryptographic token which is protected by passphrase at the *users* site, then good look trying to brute-force the server login.
• [11:52] Morgaine Dinova: s/good look/good luck/
• [11:52] Which Linden: SRP, you mean?
• [11:53] Morgaine Dinova: Any crypto mechanism, there's no shortage :P
• [11:53] Which Linden: [2]
• [11:53] Khamon Fate: Oh for Heaven's sake, I've miscalculated the time again. I've a question if you can take it Which.
• [11:54] Which Linden: Sue Khamon
• [11:54] Which Linden: Sure
• [11:54] Which Linden:  :-)
• [11:54] Economic Core: grabs lawyers
• [11:54] Khamon Fate: Can you explain the infrastructure updates required to support VWR-6713 - Allow Alpha Channel of Textures to be used as a 1-bit Mask (Alpha Masking)
• [11:54] Morgaine Dinova: waves at Khamon, as no scenary is visible owing to overlapped windows
• [11:54] Economic Core: and by lawyers I mean a ball of rags dressed up in a 3-peice suit
• [11:54] Khamon Fate: I'm hiding in the bamboo, can't see me ha ha ha
• [11:55] Morgaine Dinova: Heh
• [11:55] Which Linden: Khamon: um unfortunately we began this discussion with me being completely clueless about that topic. :-)
• [11:55] Khamon Fate: Nyx and BibgPapi says the avatar invisibility code has to be finished first
• [11:55] Khamon Fate: but that don't say why, or what the relationship is
• [11:55] Khamon Fate: Might you be willing to look into that for next week's meeting?
• [11:56] Which Linden: It's a little out of my area -- don't those guys have office hours too?
• [11:56] Khamon Fate: It's a very key issue to any creator that works with alpha textures
• [11:56] Latif Khalifa: nyx just told me on IRC that 1bit alpha masks for prims are planned for the future (yet to be determined) versions of the viewer
• [11:56] Economic Core: They do. They're also in AWG so we can interrog-I mean ask them nicely
• [11:56] Latif Khalifa: he wouldn't commit on the timeline though ;)
• [11:56] Khamon Fate: They do, but they're saying it's infrastructure code updates they're waiting for.
• [11:57] Khamon Fate: Yes Latif Andrew told us the same thing four years ago
• [11:58] Morgaine Dinova: Bad idea ever mentioning times for features, puts Lindens in a tough spot. Really what matters is just whether something is in active development, or merely mentioned over coffee.
• [11:58] Latif Khalifa: they are working on alpha masks, its alrady implemented for the avatars, and prims are coming soon
• [11:58] Which Linden: Great way to put it Morgaine
• [11:59] Latif Khalifa: so i don't think its one of those "yeah, we'll have c# for scripting soon" ;)
• [11:59] Which Linden: most schedules are governed by factors far outside the understanding of a single individual
• [11:59] Khamon Fate: It certainly would've certainly put them in a spot if they'd put a timestamp on them at any point through the years we've talked about it
• [11:59] Saijanai Kuhn: speakign of active development, definitely "sticky licenses" are being worked on as a supplement to the permissions system
• [12:00] Economic Core: polints to sign
• [12:00] Economic Core: points, too
• [12:00] Khamon Fate: Oh that's good Which. You should pass that along to Philip to replace "you simply don't understand the complexities of the code we're dealing with"
• [12:00] Morgaine Dinova: Which: I've never liked speculative release dates. Things are ready when they're ready.
• [12:00] Latif Khalifa: i think lindens got too shy about mentioning deadlines since "oh, we'll have havok2 in a few months"
• [12:00] Khamon Fate: soon
• [12:00] Khamon Fate: soon Morgaine soo
• [12:00] Morgaine Dinova: Hehe
• [12:01] Khamon Fate: n
• [12:01] Economic Core: Havok 6 would be nice, since Havok 6 is freely available to noncorporate users.
• [12:01] Economic Core: >_>
• [12:02] Aimee Trescothick: don't think LL qualifies as non-corp though lol
• [12:02] Which Linden: Nope....heh I'm sure everyone is real enthusiastic about going through all that again
• [12:02] Economic Core: lol
• [12:03] Economic Core: I was implying an opensource release since a major non-free license would be partially freed up
• [12:03] Which Linden: Oh yeah that would be cool
• [12:03] Aimee Trescothick: could stick it into a viewer for cloth physics etc.
• [12:03] Which Linden: Or... client-side predciction!
• [12:03] Which Linden: And let's not forget: doubling the size of the binary to download!
• [12:03] Which Linden: Yayy!
• [12:03] Aimee Trescothick: lol
• [12:04] Economic Core: Quadrupling actually
• [12:04] Morgaine Dinova: Which: you lost me at "far outside the understanding of a single individual". That's universally a copout which puts the decision making into the hands of others, regardless of their competence. I don't buy that one. Techies are the people best placed to make technical decisions about a technical platform, not CEOs.
• [12:04] Economic Core: points at Havok 6 folder on his HDD.
• [12:06] Economic Core: PING
• [12:06] Morgaine Dinova: Still here, but it's gone quiet
• [12:06] Morgaine Dinova: And Sai lost connection
• [12:06] Economic Core: /ctcp Which ping
• [12:06] Morgaine Dinova: Hehe
• [12:07] Which Linden: OK sorry Morgaine, didn't mean to make such a sweeping generalization
• [12:07] Which Linden: Yeah got distracted IRL
• [12:07] Morgaine Dinova: Hehe, wb
• [12:07] Economic Core: Coworker trying to steal your lunch?
• [12:07] Khamon Fate: I think we can leave it Morgain. The answer is apparently "no" they're not gonna provide the ability to upload 1-bit alpha textures.
• [12:08] Economic Core: Not publically, anyway
• [12:08] Khamon Fate: sorry Morgaine
• [12:08] Economic Core: Only Nyx seems to have the ability
• [12:08] Khamon Fate: Only Nyx doesn't seem to think it's important. We only see alpha flashes on every sim.
• [12:08] Which Linden: Nyx is The One
• [12:09] Which Linden: But OK, I should run before getting distracted again, will try and follow up for ya Khamon
• [12:09] Khamon Fate: I only get a hundred IMs a week from customers wondering why trees are flashing through their alpha window walls
• [12:09] Morgaine Dinova: Oh, it's not one of my areas of interest, I'm mainly about interop. But it's sad to see a subject brought up by a bazillion residents not being on the front burner.
• [12:09] Khamon Fate: Thanks Which, I'll be here on time next week
• [12:09] Khamon Fate: vote
• [12:09] Morgaine Dinova: Cheers Which, tc :-)
• [12:09] Economic Core: If Nyx doesn't want to work on it, he should give us what he's done so far so the community can finish it for him
• [12:09] Which Linden:  :-)
• [12:09] Khamon Fate: VWR-6713
• [12:10] Khamon Fate: vote vote vote
• [12:10] Which Linden: Cool! Great talking with y'all!
• [12:10] Morgaine Dinova: OK Kh :-)
• [12:10] Economic Core: Voting doesn't do jack, IME.
• [12:10] Latif Khalifa: take care which
• [12:10] Morgaine Dinova: I agree, but expression of support helps
• [12:10] Which Linden: It does have an effect, just not a hugely satisfying one from your perspective :-/
• [12:10] Economic Core: AYou can get a 300-vote showstopper and a Linden won't look at it until people show up with pitchforks
• [12:11] Papa Popinjay: Thank you and bye
• [12:11] Latif Khalifa: goes votes for VWR-6713
• [12:11] Which Linden: Laters!