A visit to the Goth Fair, and an unfair result

For various reasons Miss Vila's been rather busy the last couple of weeks so we've not had much chance to spend a lot of time together in-world. Today everything fell into place and we were in a position to correct that (and, wonderfully, we'll be spending more time together tomorrow too). First up we did a quick shopping trip to buy a couple of new toys for the Raven Park Mansion and then we went on to visit something we were hoping to get to before it ended: The World Goth Fair.

I won't write too much about it as others have done a good job of covering it and, really, reviews of that sort aren't quite my thing. I will say, however, that we loved the build and had a great time wandering around all the stalls and checking out what was available. The other thing of note, that was impressive, was the fact that there was a region windlight setting in effect that didn't mess up Miss Vila's skin. Such a rare thing!

We both did a little bit of shopping, with me picking up a rather neat swing that'll go in our garden or, perhaps, on Raven Park itself, and Miss Vila got herself a couple of items of clothing. Most noteworthy is the new seat/throne she picked up for herself for the Raven Street studio:

As well as being the perfect spot to sit and ponder designs, or hand out tasks to me, it's also just right for a little nap too, it seems:

Afterwards we enjoyed a game or three of En Garde:

It got rather interesting though. You see, I won the first two games. They were close, but I won them both. We had a third and final game that Miss Vila won. Hence the fact that, thanks to the RLV stripping plugin we have, we finished the games like this:

But, as anyone who can visit the results site can see, I won, two games to one:

The local champions board, however, thinks otherwise!

Despite the fact that neither of us have played in ages, to the point that neither of our names were on the local champions board, there it was... Miss Vila on 15 and me on 14.

Of course, she claimed this as a victory. Never mind the fact that my world ranking was also higher than hers. No. She decided that world ranking and, indeed, number of games won, didn't count. All that mattered was the numbers on the local champions board.

I'm starting to think there's some sort of Femdom advantage coded into the game...

Group Auto-Changer

Earlier today someone asked in the "Builder's Brewery" group if it was possible to write a script that would auto-set your active group when you enter a specific region. They also happened to say that an RLV solution would be just fine. As luck would have it there's just such a command in the RLV API so I pointed them at it. In their case they just needed it to work for one specific region. However, I got to thinking that it'd be kind of handy to have a script that worked off a list of regions.

So this happened:

Issues with editing large scripts on LeTigre regions?

I'll add any updates about this at the bottom of the post.

Given the nature of how Second Life works, and given the nature of anything net-based in general, I didn't bat an eyelid back on Friday when I tried to open a script for editing and it just didn't open. I had other things I needed to get on with so I put it down to it being "one of those things" and carried on.

I started to worry a little more when, later in the day, the same thing happened. I'd try and open the script (which was in an object's inventory) and the editor would just sit there, saying it was loading, and nothing more would happen.

A little more playing showed that smaller scripts where just fine, slightly bigger ones appeared to show an unusual delay but would then load, and then anything "non-trivial" in size (for values of "non-trivial" I've yet really figure out) would just fail to load.

I've seen this sort of thing before, of course. Normally TPing away and back, or a relog, fixes the issue. So I tried both of those things and it made no difference. Next up was to try a region restart. Again, I've seen similar effects in the past that a restart has cured so, seeing as nobody was around at the time, I kicked off the restart.

This didn't fix it either. The region came back, I TPd back in, same problem.

Next I TPd over to a plot I have on a main channel region. I rezzed out a copy of the object that was having the problem and... the script opened in the editor just fine!

I then TPd home once more, tried the same, and had the same problem.

As luck would have it a region next to my mainland plot is a LeTigre region. So, this time, testing with a script in my inventory (rather than in an object's inventory), which was failing to load into the editor back on my home region, I headed back to my mainland plot and tried again. Sure enough, it loaded just fine on the main channel plot. I then closed the editor, walked over into the adjoining LeTigre region and tried to edit it again. It failed. This time, for the first time, it failed with the following error:

Second Life: Unable to load the script.  Please try again

That seemed to narrow it down. It looked like it wasn't (obviously) an issue with my setup, it was something to do with LeTigre regions (and possibly other RC regions? I've not been able to test just yet).

By this point I was running out of time and wouldn't be in-world for a day or two so, on the off-chance that it might be useful to someone else, I mentioned it in the forum thread for that week's deploy.

Today I've had the chance to do some more testing. So far I'd been doing all of this with the latest version of Firestorm so, to eliminate any issues with that, I installed the latest Lab viewer and did all of my tests again, with a different avatar too. This time I managed to make a script that was simple, could be shared with anyone, and displayed the same problem. You can find a copy of it over here. I can reliably create a script in inventory, open it in the editor, paste that into it, close the editor, try and reopen it and it fails to open.

Since then I've also done things like reboot my router, turn off any form of DoS/scan protection (just in case), etc... Nothing's made an obvious difference.

So, right now, for me at least, LeTigre regions are stopping me from getting at the source code for any of my non-trivial scripts. Thankfully I've got them all backed up locally, of course. And, for now, it seems I can go to a main channel region to edit them. That does mean though that the region I rent, the place where my workshop is, isn't much good as a place to script.

I've now filed a Jira for this so, hopefully, one way or another (an issue with my setup, or a server issue), this'll get sorted in the next week or so. If not, I'm sort of worried about what this means for existing scripts that, until last week, I could get at.

If anyone else can reproduce the above I'd love to hear about it.

Update 1: I've had one person report back that they are having no trouble loading the test script on LeTigre regions, including the one next to my mainland plot. So it's not a general issue then. Damn. :S

Update 2: I've now tested this issue on the Main Channel, BlueSteel, Magnum and LeTigre sandboxes. The script loads just fine on all of them apart from LeTigre.

Update 3: I've tested this on a different machine on a different network and with a different Internet connection and, there, the script opens just fine. In fact, it opens faster than I'm used to most scripts opening. So there's something particular about my normal environment and LeTigre regions.

Update 4: For the sake of completeness I've tested on a different machine, on the same network and Internet connection as the machine I was initially having the problem with, and I get the exact same results there (won't load on LeTigre, loads elsewhere).

Update 5: Interestingly, the same test script, pasted as text into a notecard, loads just fine.

Update 6: The problem has been identified and a workaround to let me work on big scripts has been found too. I've just had a bit of a chat with Andrew Linden, who did some tests while I reproduced the problem, and the cause has been identified. He also suggested a workaround that works every time for me. If I lower my viewer bandwidth to around 200kbps (normally I'm on 500 and, while trying to get to the bottom of this myself, I'd actually upped it to 1100kpbs using this formula). The moment I dropped my bandwidth to 200kbps the large script started loading again without any problems. Yeah, I'm a bit relieved. ;)

Update 7: After the 2013-06-05 rolling restart everything is back as it was. I can now load large scripts again as I used to be able to. The code that caused the problem has been backed out, from what I've been told. What is exciting is that I tested some new code over on the beta grid the other day that had large scripts loading for me in less than a second. "Normal" loading of large scripts for me right now is around 5 to 8 seconds. Hopefully that change will hit the RC channels in the near future.

Wound up

As you might recall, just over a week ago, Miss Vila locked me in a gas mask. One of the more (*looks around to ensure his Mistress isn't watching*) annoying aspects if it was the sound. It made a breathing sound. Miss Vila seems to have a thing about this, locking things on me that have a simple repetitive sound. It's always there. No matter if I'm working in-world, or my viewer is in the background while I work in something else, the sound is there...

So I was a little relieved when she turned up today and made moves to remove the mask:

After she did, we had a little chat about what I should wear for tomorrow night's Raven Park dance. This alone should have set an alarm bell or two ringing given that, normally, it's her outfit we spend significant time working on.

A little bit of shopping (and a fair bit of frustration with a couple of specific RLV-based products -- perhaps a subject for another blog entry) later and all was revealed:

That's right. As of now I'm her mechanical boy doll. And it's not just a change of skin and a metal had. Oh, no, there's some longer-term RLV involved too:

It's a fully-working RLV-enabled doll key. The sort that winds down and leaves you stranded when you do. Also the sort that others can turn to wind you up again. For now, until the dance at least, I've been left with the right to rewind myself. But I get the impression that this won't be the case by the end of the weekend.

And remember what I said about being glad about not having to listen to the gas mask? This key ticks. It ticks, and ticks, and ticks, and....

And it also has a renamer. Miss has turned it on. She knows me so well...

PS: No prizes for guessing what one of Miss Vila's favourite songs is:

So thoughtful...

It's getting to that time of year when RL-me starts to suffer a little with hay fever. Sometimes just sitting in the garden and enjoying the sunshine can be uncomfortable. It seems that was all the excuse Miss Vila needed to dig out an old gas mask of mine (a copy/mod one I got from somewhere, that I added my own RLV lock script to) and lock it on:

Of course, to "stop" me from removing it, that meant she felt the need to cuff my hands behind my back:

She's so thoughtful...

What a difference a couple of years makes...

Following on from my last post, I couldn't resist the idea of making a gif of the evolution of what was "Shackles Femdom" into "Raven Park". This is a fairly big gif, so give it a while to load.

I'm really pleased with how this has turned out.

Each frame is about a month apart, except for a couple of moments where I've done a couple of consecutive days as big changes happened (mainly the first couple of rental buildings going up on Raven Park rentals and then the rezzing of the new shop this weekend).

What a difference a day makes...

Anyone who follows the Z&A blog will know that, this last weekend, we made a huge upgrade to our main store. Before we started on Saturday it looked like this:

And, after we were finished, it looked like this:

(that's actually a bit over a day later -- the sharp-eyed will also notice we replaced all the bridges on Raven Park too).

Now, given two images with obvious differences, there's a thing that has to happen, right? Animated gif time!

Seeing this I'm tempted to start grabbing historical maps of the region going back to when we took it over and making an animation of its evolution. That could be all sorts of fun.