The last names list. It’s not scaling well, and is probably the biggest sticking point for new users right now, prior to signing in the first time. At least, the people I’M trying to get to join. They want a good name and are willing to delay signing up till they can get one. There are a LOT of last names on the list now (over 300), and it takes a while to go through all of them. Many of them now seem to be geared towards a particular country or language - or at least, many of them are unpronounceable to me without working at it for a moment or two.

I like humorous names, myself, but was unable to find one that wasn’t taken after about 40-50 tries. It seems that some of the more generic English-style names have been on there for quite some time. Are they still being dropped after 100 or so uses?

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Second Life has seen an enormous amount of growth in the last year, and that has been both a boon and the bane of Linden Lab. While it means that the real world is discovering (and liking) Second Life, it means any and all mistakes made in the infrastructure with regard to scaling will throw a spanner in the works.

And that has happened.

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1) Build a website called rottenprims.com

2) Recruit well-respected players to scout out and review locations in Second Life

3) Collect multiple reviews for each location and total the positive and negative viewpoints

4) Publish reviews and total score on website for each location

5) Provide lists of locations based on scores and individual reviewers

Bonus) Allow populous to rate reviewers. Use relative reviews to create 2nd, weighted scores

You have 30 minutes. No talking. Raise your hand if you have a problem.

UPDATE: Well, I gave you all over a year to do this. Time’s up! Turn your papers over. I’ve just registered the name.

Forum-posted idea reprinted here for posterior. Um, I mean: posterity!

It would be nice if, in Second Life iteself, you could go into a Position Editing mode where your avatar freezes and “handles” appear at each joint. Selecting a handle brings up the normal rotaion edit locus we use to rotate prims, but it rotates that joint instead. Once done editing all the joints you want, and your own actual avatar is in the position you desire you can save this pose as an animation.

This would just be a one-frame pose, but with the addition of a window to track multiple frames, I can see the possibility of doing full animations. All we lose this way is reverse kinematics, but that usually causes more problems for new animators than it helps them. (But it could still be added, as a toggle option later.)

If you are playing a moddable animation when you trigger this Position Editing mode, you are editing that animation (but like the Appearance Editing mode, you can Save… or Save As… when done).

If it’s no mod, or you aren’t playing anything, the avatar reverts to the standard starting pose before you start to edit. (And you can only Save As…)

We know that a built-in web browser is coming to Second Life, first as a window, then as WWW-ona-prim.

But what about a third use?

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Now ol’ Shelly didn’t have the best business model. Her little seashore shop sold a product that anyone walking by could pick up out of the sand for nothing but a little back flexing and sandy hands. (And with a re-purposed pooper-scooper cane, even those costs could be eliminated.)

In second life, we have no production costs either. Make one, and from then on it’s pure profit. The problem comes when you realize it’s all just data…

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Permissions are all about allowing people and groups of people to do things. At least, that’s the model I’m using. There are two others… Allow everything then indicate restrictions (but that can have dangerous security issues), and mix permissions and restrictions together (but that can/will get messy and confusing).

So if you’ve been following the examples in this blog, you may have gotten the feeling that those dummy permissions I was using may not be so dummy. I did try to keep them self-consistant as I went along, even to the point of going back and tweeking them a bit. I’ve been trying to find a system of encoding permissions that is compact and clear, while retaining the ability to design-in more later. “More” both in number and in variety.

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Well, a couple of hours in learning some DHTML and messing about has got me this, an interactive verion of the permission lists I’ve been making here in the blog. It may not work on all browsers… I’ve only tested on the latest Firefox (PC and Mac) so far.

I’ll be adding more funtionality to it as I think of it. It would be totally cool to have a complete simulation running!

Next: Advance on My Allowance

Let me try another example here, this time in a future world of Second Life. I’ll use the example from two entries back as the base.

I have a plot of land. I parcel it up in chunks and do a bit of decorating and I end up with this:

I want to rent the two lots out and perhaps make a bit of money. I make a group called “Tiger Tenants” to keep the operation organized.

Now in the Olde Seconde Life, I’d put the land under the group’s control and invite people into the group when they rent a lot. They can then build on their lot, but they can also build anywhere else on my land, including the other lot. There is no limitation on the number of prims they can use, beyond the hard limit imposed by the size of the total land. Also, adding them to the group gives them other abilities unrelated to simple land rental, such as getting a portion of the dwell bonus for the whole area, among other things.

But, thankfully, I live in Nuevo Second Life, where groups work much better!

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I was originally thinking a group’s Roles would be arranged in a hierarchical format, each sub-Role inheriting default permissions from the one above it, with local changes. But it was the local changes that made it too complex.

What if, instead of granting further permissions, a sub-Role took some away. If being in multiple Roles wasn’t forbidden, then it wouldn’t be possible to tell whether a person could or couldn’t do something if they were in one Role that allowed it and one that didn’t.

By going flat, not only is the whole layout easier to see and manipulate (a list instead of a tree structure), but you can go with purely additive permissions, since you never have to take one away that was granted in a higher Role.

I thought I’d give an example of a flat group with members in multiple Roles, just to give a taste of how this would… Well, not look per se, but feel. Here it is, fully expanded. (Normally, each section would be closed until you twiddle it open.)

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