Testing the gift

Today Mistress and I headed in-world so she could finally unpack and have a play with the gift I got her at the weekend.

Although we initially met in the house we thought it best to head up to the workshop so we'd have plenty of space and none of those "rezzing on a mesh floor" issues.

As for the gift I got her? Well, normally I tend to go for clothing or household items, as you'll have seen on this blog in the past. But, this time, seeing as how it was a gift for our collaring anniversary, I thought it might be fun to buy Mistress something that's heavily RLV-based. Most RLV things are things I'd wear so this made a nice change. The gift was the MoDesign Inventory Access Control system.

The whole thing is really well thought out. You get a set of different props that are all nicely animated and which, in conjunction with a HUD that the sub wears, controls access to your inventory and rights to things related to inventory.

The areas of control are:

• Ability to rez and edit
• Ability to edit and view scripts
• Ability to edit and view notecards
• Ability to view textures from inventory
• Ability to access inventory

Obviously some of these are predicated on other things being available. For example, being allowed to script isn't much use if you can't edit objects and don't have access to your inventory. That sort of thing. Given that I think it's fair to say that it's not a system you use lightly -- it's one of those fascinating RLV products that takes time and thought to get the most out of it and which, over time, reveals modes of use you'd not originally considered (much like Mistress' use of Sub-Allowance and the Punishment Picker).

After a very brief play around with it Mistress quickly realised and decided that this wasn't something I'd be able to use all of the time. On the one hand she liked the idea of having these control objects set on a table or shelf in the workshop, only allowing me to work on stuff when I'm in the workshop (or on sim -- the owner can configure the "sphere of influence" of these objects and there seems to be no on-sim distance limit). On the other hand she realised that this could be very awkward if I needed to fix things off-sim (sometimes I need to go tweak things at mall locations, and I also need to stuff the dropboxes for CasperVend at our backup location).

Our needs, given we run a region and a business, are rather particular and likely unusual. Having all inventory access disappear just because I've gone somewhere else wouldn't work out too well. Ideally access would be granted for a set period of time, that Mistress could define, which would expire once I'm out of range. In other words it'd be best for us if I could go and "charge up" my edit/rez/inv privileges before heading off elsewhere, careful to remember that (for example) Mistress had granted 30 minutes before the rights expired.

Like I say though: our needs and our way of working is probably unusual for most people who'd use this.

Having tried the different permutations of what could and couldn't be done Mistress decided that the best use for this would be to add it as an item in the allowance payment list. The idea being that, sometimes, I'll spend a few days under the control of this.

For now it's all packed back away in Mistress' inventory but it'll be coming back out again, no question.

Before we said goodnight in-world I made the mistake of mentioning to Mistress a problem that I have with the MD gas mask (it's one I have mentioned before). The mask has huge horns attached to it which, normally (for me anyway), are invisible. Often, when my camera angle is in the normal position, I'll find myself touch them rather than touching some thing in-world that I'm trying to touch. It's not unusual to find me trying, and failing, to open a door; before I then realise my mistake and I'm swearing at the helmet.

Mistress said she'd happily for that for me.

I should have known better...

Dressed for the dance (and a new purchase)

Yesterday was the opening dance for The Femdom Hunt V. Here's the outfits Mistress and I went with:

Yes, I've finally cracked and now own a pair of MD's ballet boots. I've always shied away from them in the past because, in days of old, they heavily used invisiprims (as everything did back then -- no reflection on this particular product) and my experience of making such footwear fit a male form put me off spending the money.

Not now though. Alpha layers make all the difference.

Adjusting the boots was dead easy (and not fraught with any worries of breaking them given they're copy and I could make a backup), as was modifying the in-built AO to add my own standing animations. The stands are far too "girly sub" for Mistress' and my taste so that was a pretty important change. There was no effort involved at all. Rez the main boot, drop in my stand animations, edit the AO notecard and take it back in and wear, forcing a reload of the notecard.

Well worth the money.

So expect to see them turn up in my allowance list at some point.

A new blindfold

It should come as no surprise that, quite often, I'll hit the Marketplace, enter "RLV", hit search and then order by newest first. While I derive a lot of pleasure from making RLV products in Second Life I also get a lot of pleasure from using them (well, having them used on me....). So no surprises that I like to keep an eye out for anything that looks fun, or neat, or just plain nice, or any combination of those things.

Last week I noticed this blindfold from PixelFashion. Given the mixture of leather and lace I knew it was the sort of thing that Mistress would really like and, sure enough, when I showed it to her she strongly suggested that it was something I should own.

And now I do:

I'd noticed from the listings that there was a non-RLV version, which appeared to be no-modify, and an RLV version which was modify. The RLV version, according to the listing, was scripted with OpenCollar scripts. While I'm sure that'd be useful for some it didn't seem very "blindfoldy" to me and, besides, I already wear one set of OC scripts in my own collar which Mistress made for me. But that wasn't an issue. What we had here was a very affordable and very attractive mesh blindfold that had lots of colour/texture options and which was modify too.

Perfect for dropping my own code in. Even easier given that I've just recently made two other personal blindfolds using purchases I'd made elsewhere so I had all the code ready to drop in.

The blindfold itself seems very well made and really does look good. The colour/texture change HUD is straightforward and the resize system that's part of the HUD was very simple to use. The other nice thing about it is that, out of the box, it was a pretty good fit for me -- very unusual even for items aimed at male avatars. In fact, I had to size it down just a touch.

The really interesting part was that, a short while after I'd bought it, the creator IMd me to ask what I thought of it. I told them that I thought it was a very attractive build and that I'd removed all the scripts and replaced them with my own because I had a particular use for it. I was rather relieved when their reaction was to be delighted by that idea.

This... right here, this is SL at its best. A content creator who allows the object itself to be modified and who actively welcomes people making changes to suit their own needs.

That made me very happy.

And Mistress is happy too because I've got a blindfold in my #RLV folder that is very her.

The new transaction history

Edit 2014-06-13: Got to my desk this morning to find that the two big issues mentioned here are now fixed. That's a real relief and, suddenly, the transaction history is working sweetly, makes sense and adds utility. Nice job Lab web/JS/AngularJS person.

I missed most of the fun the first time the new transaction history was launched. It was launched unannounced. It appeared to annoy pretty much everyone who saw it. It appeared to be pulled again pretty quickly. I get the impression that it wasn't so much launched as it escaped.

But, now, we have it and we've being living with it for a week or so. And it's terrible. Really terrible.

Let me be clear: I generally do my best to not be one of those people who abhors change. If something changes I'll try my best to understand where the motivation for that change came from and, as much as possible, I'll try and adapt.

No, the reason why I say the new transaction history is terrible isn't because I dislike change. What I dislike is change that removes utility and makes life harder for little or no obvious benefit. From where I'm sat right now the new transaction history appears to do that, it appears to have been developed by people who don't actually use the transaction history or realise how it's used.

First off, there's the problem that I've seen most people mention: you can't easily select a single day to view. As I write this it's 2014-06-11 here (I'm in the UK). It's also 2014-06-11 in SL too. I want to view all of my transaction history for today so far so the obvious selection would be to set the start and end date to 2014-06-11. That's how the old transaction history worked. It worked. Not now though, if I do that now I get:

Please specify a correct date format of YYYY/mm/dd and ensure the start date occurs prior to the end date.

Why? Why would I want the start date to be before the end date? Why doesn't it make sense to select a single day range by starting and ending on the same day? Such a simple thing to want to do and already the new history interface is breaking the rule of least astonishment.

Okay, fine. So to view the history for today I have to set today as my start date and tomorrow (which is in the future as of the time of writing) as my end date. Apparently I have to work for the system, not the other way round. Apparently the system is coded such that it can't do a sensible comparison when validating my input (and, presumably, no longer does a sensible comparison when selecting the data).

Anyway, I set my start date to today and my end date to tomorrow and, sure enough, I get today's transactions (sort of, more on that a little later).

But what if I want to view the transactions for a single day from a few days ago? Based on what I'm seeing above the idea is that I should make the day I'm interested in the start date and the following day the end date. If I'm to follow the above then it would seem that the range is inclusive of the start date but exclusive of the end date. So, I do that, and I get....

...two days worth of data! Data from the start date and data from the end date. So it seems that it's inclusive of the start date and end date but the end date always has to be greater than the start date so the only way you can get data for a single day is if the following day has no data -- or the following day hasn't happened yet.

Yeah, you could say I'm astonished.

And the thing to remember is this: before the changes this worked just fine. I could select a single day and I'd get data for that single day. I was not in the least bit astonished by that.

But it gets even better. Starting today (I think it started today) the transaction history is now showing me transaction times in my local timezone. On the surface that might actually seem useful. But, really, it isn't. Not for me it isn't. Here's why:

Second Life is a global environment. People from all over the world, at all longitudes and latitudes, interact with each other, work together, build together, play together, run and attend events together. The thing that makes all of this work is a common understanding of time. Second Life, as we all know, uses a timezone that is the same as the Lab's office. Personally I think that's a bad choice; personally, if it had been me, I'd have gone with UTC. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that, no matter where you are in the RL world, the SL world has a common time.

This makes organising everything so much easier (well, apart from when they break the code or, as happened earlier this year, forget to take DST into account).

Miss Vila is also my business partner. One of us is in the UK, the other in Australia. We have customers from all over the world, in all sorts of timezones. I keep and update our sales records based off what she sends to me; we both support our customers based off what they tell us. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever for her to see those sales in her local timezone. It especially serves no useful purpose when she emails those sales to me and they're in her local timezone which isn't my local timezone which isn't SL's timezone.

Even better: the transaction history, as it appears right now, doesn't even match what you see in a) the marketplace sale notification emails or b) the marketplace order history report. From the point of view of a Second Life merchant the SL merchant tools are not internally consistent. (from what I can see it is actually internally consistent¹, it's just presented in a way that makes it look otherwise).

It's a mess.

And then there's the fact that it doesn't remember my preference for how many items I'd like to view....

And then there's the fact that one date format is used to display times (a form of ISO 8601, an excellent choice) and yet in the date input/picker they use a slightly different format.

Really, it's a mess.

The thing is, I get what they're trying to do. The ability to better control what you see, especially the filter, makes so much sense. I really like that as an idea. But how the heck did what we see now make it past any kind of quality control? There's no need whatsoever to break how things used to work just to add this feature.

There just isn't.

What I find so utterly frustrating about this is that timezones and time are a really difficult problem. Really, for a programmer, they are:


And the nice thing is that the Lab had it sorted. They gave the grid a single timezone and used it everywhere. And now they've broken that.

I hope this isn't on purpose.

---

¹ If you're comfortable using your browser's console you can see that, internally, the model object that holds the current data has the time of the transaction as a JavaScript time object and that the time is correct. Try:

angular.element("#history-table").scope().history.historyDataMod[0]

and inspect the result to see (assuming you've got at least one row of history showing).

MP listing names in "other" languages

I'll start off by mentioning that when I say "other" languages I mean it from my perspective. I'm British and I speak and write English so I'm obviously viewing this from the perspective of someone who views the Second Life marketplace in English.

I was first alerted to this by Reven Rosca of Meshoptotamia and PRIME fame and it has been written up as BUG-6194. When she first pointed me at it I was kind of confused. While I've always found it a little inconvenient that the listing title got overwritten when doing a quick fill it's never been that much of a hassle -- a quick edit and it's fixed. And, recently, I've even found it useful that it has overwritten it.

The part that really had me confused though was the mention of the issue regarding language. At Z&A we only ever list items in English and, as far as I'd always known, in the absence of anything written into a different language's tab on the marketplace page for a given product, it shows the English details. And it does. Only...

Take this screenshot of a selection of Z&A products. Each one's carefully named. All we've ever done, ever, is edit the English title and text. Each and every one has also been made by creating a listing from an unassociated item, quick filled from another similar item, and then the listing title set correctly:

As you can see, all the names are correct. You can match the listing title with the title you see in the vendor image itself. But look what happens if you switch the marketplace to German and view the same listings:

Every single one has the wrong listing name! The reason is obvious, of course. At some point, for some reason, the listing title for the Z&A Body Cage (or something that was quick filled from it) has had the title copied over into the German language listing details. This has then, over time, been propagated into lots of other listings when quick fill has been used. Thing is, that copying (from English to German) won't have been done by us. And, talking to Reven, it looks like she's got the same issue happening and neither would she have done that with her listings.

What's even odder is that this doesn't seem to be happening for everything. Looking through our listings I can see lots of products that I know were created using quick fill that are just fine, and then there's a whole load of them that are wrong.

It looks like we've got a lot of work on our hands, going through all the listings and cleaning them up. You might want to do the same with yours too. If you've never done it before, or haven't done it in a long time, now's the time to visit your MP shop and select a different language here:

and see what it looks like. There's a good chance that you've got listings with very wrong titles.

Edit to add: I'm starting to go though some listings to see what's what. One odd thing I am noticing is that in every single case the Spanish tab, and only the Spanish tab, has a full copy of the English tab. All the details. So, with some listings, I'm seeing fully-populated English details (written by me), the listing title (and only the title) filled (and often older) for all other languages, except Spanish, which is the English all over again.

Further edit to add: I've just found some listings where the English was correct, all languages except Spanish had empty details (as they should) but with the wrong listing title (which should have been empty) and the Spanish was all the details from a totally different product again (one of ours).

Another edit to add: I've just noticed that if I view Z&A's shop in German a minority of listings have the wrong name. On the other hand, if I view our shop in Spanish, the majority are wrong. Here's what seems to be happening: a minority appear to have somehow had "Z&A Body Cage (Steel)" assigned to the listing title in all languages and, over time, this has propagated via quick fill. But note only the title. On the other hand, Spanish seems to be a special case. The Spanish language tab appears to get filled with all the details from the English tab of the product listing I'm quick filling from. So the rule appears to be that if you're working in English (at least) and you quick fill product B from product A both the English and Spanish tabs get filled with the English details of product A. If you never think to look at the Spanish tab (why would you, you'd expect it to be empty) you'll have all your listings wrong in Spanish.

Final edit of the night to add: Going back to our oldest listings, ones that existed on the old XStreet and were migrated during the great migration, I can see that the Spanish language tab is filled with the English and that all the other language tab are empty. That in itself isn't an issue. The Spanish tab contains the same text as the English tab so the product listings are fine. The problem comes with all products that were created post-migration and were created using quick fill. From then on you pretty much seem to end up with listings that are the correct English (of course) but the wrong Spanish because the Spanish tab is the Spanish tab from the listing you copied from, which is the English of the originating product. Simply put: if you quick fill a lot and you've filled from pre-migration listings you might have a lot of badly-worded listings when viewed in Spanish.

New boots (and a dress)

New boots and a dress for Miss Vila, that is. ;)

Last night was a great example of one of those occasions where the initial plan gets derailed by something lovely that turns up. When Mistress and I got together I passed her a notecard that Miss Eve had given me that had details of the release of a set of boots that she'd very obviously like. The original reason for going in-world sort of got forgotten as we headed off into demo-trying territory (well, Mistress tried the demos, I just stood, hobbled, in her studio, providing feedback and thoughts).

It was decided that the boots should be acquired, which then meant a new dress had to be acquired, which then meant the right stockings had to be found, which meant..... The final result was rather lovely.

By this time Mistress was rather exhausted (apparently it was terribly inconvenient of me that I was hobbled and not in a state where I could accompany her and carry her bags) and it was also past my bedtime.

Talking of bedtime.... Just one more to go and then I get out of the hobble. Of course, at that point, I'm likely due back in the bane suit for the second 5 hour banishment session. And after that there's the rest of the allowance payment backlog to serve. Meanwhile, I'll be needing more top-ups for various things.

Second Life marketplace borkage

Well this is a fun one. This is what Z&A's marketplace (and everyone else's marketplace, of course) looks like right now:

Most of the images are broken image link markers. If I right click on one of them and try and visit the image's URL I get this:

And, sure enough, if I look at the date range that it's valid for:

Oops! Guess someone on the marketplace team didn't think to set a reminder in their calendar. ;)

Edit to add: there's now a JIRA for the issue.

Rorschach

As I've mentioned a few times before, I'm not really one for going to dances on my own. It's the sort of thing I do with Miss Vila or not at all (except when Z&A sponsor a dance or two). But, yesterday, when Miss Eve announced the theme of that afternoon's dance (SciFi and comic book heroes) it was too good to pass up (and nicely coincidental with this weekend's Raven Park dance too).

I spent a bit of time pondering outfits but, in the end, I found just the thing on the marketplace. I decided to go as Rorschach.

The outfit/avatar itself isn't perfect, the inside of the coat is invisible so it doesn't look quite right from the front if your legs are open any distance (something that'll happen when you're dancing) and I'd say that, with the supplied shape (which also deforms), the legs look a little too skinny. Those couple of minor quibbles aside I was very pleased with it, especially given that the pattern on the mask actually does move and change.

The dance itself was fun and, as always, Miss Eve had a great set going. I took a bunch of photos which you can see over on this album.

My new suit

For as long as I've existed in SL I've been after a good suit. A really good suit. I came close a couple of times in the pre-mesh era, and those couple of suits still get an outing, but I've never found a mesh one that's quite clicked with me.

Like many guys on the grid I've got the L&B tux. For me, it's okay, it's not bad, but it just doesn't sit right. I don't know if it's just down to my avatar's shape or something but the shoulders have always looked wrong. I think I look like I have a perma-shrug when wearing it. Also it always seems to have a bit of a "stiff cardboard" look about it.

This weekend gone Miss Vila and I were attending a wedding so a new suit was very much in order. I was dreading shopping for one given all of the above, until I stumbled on this suit from Zaara. I grabbed the demo, not holding out much hope, and was totally amazed. It sat just right. It looked like me in it. It was pretty much spot on.

The shoulders make sense, it looks like it's sat on me properly, and the textures are wonderful. Even better is the texture-change HUD that comes with a good selection of shirts and ties. (My only complaint here is that there appears to be no remove-script option in the HUD and the suit itself is no-mod -- I much prefer to create a texture combination and then kill scripts).

Combined with a pair of L&B dress shoes I think the whole thing works really well.

If the fatpack wasn't quite so expensive I'd have been very tempted to get it (not that I don't think it's worth the price -- I just don't have enough need for all those colours and wouldn't wear it quite so often enough to justify the cost). As it is I am very tempted to get at least one more colour, and I can see me wearing this as one of my outfits in heavy rotation.

When I'm allowed clothing, that is. ;)

Miss Vila approves

As mentioned yesterday, last night I handed over ownership of the custom-built cell in the new house. Miss Vila then spent a few moments setting up and putting it in trap mode (in other words, the door closes and a random timer starts if I step inside it). I then offered to step inside and be 100% sure that trap and timer were working okay. Miss Vila said I should.

And, as you can see, it worked a treat. The timer (set to a maximum of one hour -- at least that's what she tells me) kicked in just fine and gave me around 40 minutes. So, that test being done, I waited for her to open the door.

And waited. And waited. And...

...Mistress spent the next 40 minutes shopping for bits on the marketplace because she really hates opening a locked cell. Still, she did find something to make the new cell really useful:

Cells. Not just for storing subs.

Middle-earth

Yesterday evening we had another dance at Raven Park. This time around the dress (and music) theme was Middle-earth.

Thankfully, unlike with the last dance, finding costumes was pretty easy. Miss Vila had already seen one that had been advertised as going to be available at the SL Fantasy Fair and, earlier yesterday, with a bit of minimal sleuthing, we found it. As it happens, even though I'd already sorted myself with an outfit, I ended up with another one there too (from the same shop).

I even sorted myself with a beard. A first for me!

(I should mention that the outfit I'm wearing there is the first one I purchased and, yes, there's a texture issue with the brooch/clasp on the cloak. I dropped the maker a line and he sorted me with a fixed one within a couple of hours -- excellent service. And the fact that I didn't wear it in the end is no reflection on the outfit, it's just that the one I ended up with was 100% mesh and Miss likes to see me in mesh outfits where possible)

The dance itself was loads of fun. Here's a selection of photos:

I really enjoyed the evening. As with the Firefly dance, there was lots of great banter about all things SciFi and fantasy and, on top of that, because many of the people there were builders and makers of things RLV and kinky, there was a good bit of building talk too, with lots of ideas being swapped.

And there was a late appearance of an Easter gag. Well, dragon egg gag. That's what we decided. ;)

Mostly, though, I rather enjoyed the constant flash of Mistress leg. ;)

Hopefully there'll be another dance in a couple of weeks (it generally depends on the demands of RL on those involved). And there'll likely be another fairly geeky theme. Yes, one topic of conversation was ideas for future dress themes, and I was given the task of recording them. And record them I did. ;)

Floating away...

Despite the fact that it doesn't always work out well (region crossings being what they are in SL) I've always had a bit of a thing for flying in Second Life. There are some really fun vehicles out there. My taste has tended to lean towards helicopters and the like (you can have fun with them without needing multiple regions to get the best out of them). So when a friend alerted me to the fact that all the vehicles on the famous Terra Aeronautics store were just L$11 now I had to grab a load.

My firm favorite right now is the balloon. Especially given you can repaint it:

I think I can even get away with floating around Raven Park in this.

I also grabbed an airship that's very Raven Park. When I get a little bit of time, and when it's quiet down on the ground, I'll try and take some pictures. I did rez it out on the workshop's vehicle build/test platform and it's huge!

A tale of three reviews

I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I tend to be pretty bad at keeping up with reviews on products I have for sale on the marketplace. Partly this is because Z&A products don't get too many reviews. I imagine, to a large degree, this is down to the nature of the products we sell. Given that all reviews left have the avatar's name associated with them I guess most people won't want to advertise that they buy BDSM equipment. The other reason why I tend to be bad at knowing they've been left, which follows from this, is the fact that the marketplace has no way of alerting you to reviews or review comments (how handy would that be?!).

But recently I seem to have had a couple of very negative reviews on my personal store (the store that has some Z&A products on it, but which isn't the main marketplace store). Now, negative reviews I can handle. If I had let someone down, if I'd failed to deliver on a promise, if the product didn't work as advertised, then a negative review seems fair enough.

But I do wish people would give creators a fair chance to fix an issue first.

At Z&A we don't get many support requests, and the handful we do get are almost always down to user error or a problem with the grid itself. These things happen. And when people get in contact with us we try and respond as quickly as possible -- it's very rare that someone has to wait more than 24 hours for a reply. In every single case that this has happened we've done everything we can to help and, so far, in every single case we've managed to help.

So I do wonder what causes someone to leave a review like this one on my RLV relay scanner. It seems odd to call something "fake" because it apparently didn't work, especially when you paid a grand total of L$0 for it. As a customer I've had things turn up before that had the wrong perms, or threw errors, it just plain didn't work for some reason. And as a fellow content-creator, every time, I've dropped the vendor a line to let them know and to seek a little help. Accidents happen and mistakes can be made (wrong perms, bug in scripts, etc...) and I think everyone should be given a fair chance to investigate the issue and correct it.

Far from being "fake", the relay scanner is a real body of code that really works. Here's a quick test I've just done. I dropped into a region where I was sure someone would likely have a relay that would respond and, sure enough:

That's it working. That's it not being "fake" (moreover, if I wanted it to be a fake product, wouldn't I just have it lie about finding relays so as to appear like it's working, wouldn't that be properly fake?).

As for why it might not work for the customer in question, it could be any of the following:

• Nobody around them had RLV enabled.
• Nobody around them was wearing a relay.
• Nobody around them had their relay turned on.
• Nobody was in range.
• Scripts were slow to run due to lag.
• Scripts were disabled on the plot they were stood on.
• Anyone with a relay had the HUD-user muted.
• The user of the HUD was expecting it to "just work" whereas the idea is you initiate a scan by touching it.

Or any number of other possible reasons. I'd actually be very interested to find out what those reasons are, if there are reasons. I wish they'd dropped me a line so we could look into it. Even though it's a free product, I'm still always happy to provide support.

I've dropped them a line to see if I can help.

Here's another example of a bad review that could easily be solved (and was) with a quick IM:

This time this was for a product with an actual price. I contacted the person who left the review to confirm things and it turns out that, yes, as the subject above says, the product disappeared when it was rezzed. Anyone who has been in SL for any length of time will know that all sorts of issues can happen with the asset servers. It's not unusual or unknown for items to not rez yet disappear from your inventory. It's not common, but it's not unusual either. Even more so if you do this while there are known asset server issues, or maintenance is happening.

Again, the obvious thing to do would have been to drop me a line. While I'd generally point out that problems with the grid are the Lab's fault, not mine, I can be persuaded to be helpful if the problem seems genuine and the hassle of them dealing with the Lab is greater than the "cost" to me (within reason, of course).

I got this customer sorted out and, they assured me, they'd fix the review.

Of course, not all reviews are all bad. Sometimes they can contain a great suggestion. Take this review of my Avatar Radar for example. That person's kind words about the build are helpful and encouraging, of course, but what really interests and impresses me is their suggestion for an improvement that'd make it work better for them. It's a great idea and I'll be releasing a new version in the next couple of days that gives them what they'll need, as a option that can be turned on.

So, please, if you have a problem with a purchase you've made on the marketplace, please, please, drop the vendor a line first. It's possible it's your error, the Lab's error or simply a honest mistake by the builder. Then, if you don't get a reply, or you don't get a helpful reply, leave honest feedback.

It's the little things...

While I'm sure there'll be some other fallout from yesterday's work on the Second Life marketplace (I've not gone looking yet and haven't checked my usual sources for such news), I think I've found one little but annoying difference that has been introduced:

Suddenly, in the MP emails, any & in the object name is being "escaped" as an HTML entity. *facepalms*

Time to look at the forums and search for a JIRA to see if anyone's already spotted it...

Today I tackled WEB-4587

I've been following WEB-4587 for a while now, but hadn't noticed anything wrong with any of the Z&A listings. Admittedly, we've been rather busy with other things so neither Zardia nor myself had looked at every single one of our MP pages.

We're now slowly migrating from our magic boxes to direct delivery and, as we migrate items, we tweak the listings a little. While doing such a set of tweaks today I noticed that we had acquired some broken listings. At this point I went through and checked every single one. Turns out we had five broken ones. Five of them had the wrong image. Five of them had lost their item associations. One of them had a different category assigned and one of them had become unlisted.

Thankfully we have a copy of every single product vendor image so fixing the images was easy enough (assuming the fix "sticks" -- I'll be keeping a close eye on things). While doing the fix I noticed that, as per some of the comments on WEB-4587, all of the products that had a problem were in the 14xxxxx range of product IDs. However, not every product we had in the 14xxxxx had the problem. Which seemed odd.

But there was something about this collection of products that felt familiar.

Thankfully Z&A has had a blog for quite a while now and we always write about new releases on there. Generally we release products in batches so a group of new products, released on the same day, will get blogged on the same day. I went back to the start of the blog and, just a few entries in, I found this entry. Sure enough, that's the five products that ended up with broken listings. The previous product release looks fine, as does the subsequent set of product release.

So it looks like the problem, for us at least, stems from that day, or a period of time that takes in that day. Remind me again when the XSteetSL to Marketplace migration period was...

It'll be interesting to see if this has fixed it. I'll be keeping an eye on those listings now.

Firestorm 4.0.1

Well, I've done it. Having just got really used to using Firestorm 3 I've wiped it from my system and gone with 4.0.1. The main motivation for making the jump was the impending need to access the merchant outbox (doubtless to be a facility that'll feature in future blog posts; hopefully in a good way, although much of what I'm reading so far isn't good news) and this overrode my reluctance to jump to something still marked "Beta" when I'd got used to 3.x.

So far, I'm impressed. I've made a point of not using the recreation of the Phoenix interface (having seen a video of it I was surprised to find that I found it looked a bit ugly now -- I think I've got very used to the default Firestorm look) and, in going with the flow, I've managed to get a very workable and very uncluttered view of Second Life:

I've not done any scripting or building in it yet so I don't know that it's as good as Firestorm 3, although I imagine it won't have changed for the worse in that regard. If it's generally stable (I've had one crash so far, while trying to unbork the bridge) I think I'm going to be very comfortable with this.

WEB-4125 causing permission information to be dropped?

I've had a few issues with my marketplace listings since the announcement of WEB-4152. Nothing too serious, I just noticed that the names of some listings had gone a little wrong. With some of the Z&A products I carry (and don't even get me started on how two avatars can't combine their marketplace listings to create a single store) the boxes are named "Product Name (Boxed)" and I change the name in the listing itself to show "Product Name" -- nothing clever, just neat and tidy. With WEB-4152 hitting I found that some of those names reverted to the pre-edit version.

Today though, I noticed an extra annoyance. It seems that the permissions information on many (but not all) of my listings had been lost. It also seems to have been on those where the name had "rolled back". So I had to go and check the permissions again.

As a shopper there's nothing I find more frustrating than finding a listing on the marketplace that gives no clue as to the permissions, so I was a little horrified to find that, through no fault of my own, I was now one of those vendors.