Mad sub in a blue box

It started a couple of weeks ago. Miss Eve mentioned that a mid-week dance over at The Velvet Thorn was going to be science fiction themed. Normally I don't do the whole party/dance thing in Second Life. It's not that I don't think they're worth doing, or worth attending -- I see that plenty of people get lots of enjoyment from them and I used to attend them fairly often with Miss Vila -- it's just that I generally struggle with busy locations and generally being sociable in large groups. I think it's entirely fair to put me under the "introvert" heading.

But... science fiction. How could I not? That's enough to drag me out of the workshop for a couple of hours and enjoy some costumed showing off.

A handful of possible outfits came to mind right away, with some Firefly goodness going right to the top of the list, but things took a twist while talking to Miss Eve and Squishy (her sub). Being kind of shy about large public groups (see above) I joked that, perhaps, I should come as the TARDIS. The reply of "you should!" came so quick that I'm sure it was typed before I'd even hit send.

And, so, what was a joking remark turned into this:

The main prim work is, of course, the Z&A Police Box Cell, stripped of all the cell code and with different code added. I coded it so that it would slowly spin when walking, hovering, flying and falling and so that it spins faster if running.

I also coded it up so that, when I teleport anywhere, the whole thing becomes invisible (I'm wearing an all-over alpha so only the box is visible anyway) and it then fades in while playing the famous TARDIS arrival noise:

Although no part of it is designed to be a restraint in any way, I did employ a little bit of RLV too. Just for extra fun I used RLV to redirect all my public chat via some code that would randomly set my "name" and then say what I was saying. The name is picked from a list of nicknames for The Doctor and other Who-related things.

It's the first time I've ever built an avatar, so to speak (ignoring the fact that I made my usual shape and, of course, selected my hair, skin, eyes, etc, over various shopping trips), and it was quite a lot of fun.

On top of all of this, Z&A ended up "sponsoring" the dance by way of creating a custom build for it and giving it as a gift to anyone who attended. This in turn inspired me to create a small new range of builds for Z&A. These should hit the main store and the marketplace in the next couple of weeks.

I love it when one simple remark can result in all sorts of outcomes...

llGetAgentList has arrived on sim

We've just had a rolling restart here at Raven Park and it seems one change is that our server software now supports llGetAgentList(). So I just gave it a quick test:

Works a treat too, so far. Now to have a think of some uses for this -- other than the obvious ones, of course. ;-)

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.

New phishing scam doing the rounds?

Twice this week I've had a message sent to me from an object, while I'm offline. The message looks like this:

The object 'Object' has sent you a message from Second Life:
Hi Everyone! Receive 2000L just for signing up here --> http://bit.ly/[URL REMOVED]

 = Object is owned by [NAME REMOVED] Resident
 = http://slurl.com/secondlife/[REGION REMOVED]/45/119/3000

In both cases the object has been up at 3000m above a Linden Home that has public build turned on. Both times, when I've gone over there, there's been a day-old avi at the location, along with a prim or two (curiously devoid of any scripts -- which would suggest that whatever script was used to send out the message has been removed again).

I've not followed the URL but I'm guessing this is a variation on the phishing scams that seem pretty rife in Second Life at the moment.

Anyone else seeing this? While I've seen in-group phishing attempts plenty of times of late this is a new one on me. It's also a great illustration as to why you should never have public build turn on on your plots (unless you're a sandbox, or have a good auto-return, etc...).

Simple security system

I've had this one in my inventory for a while, and it's one I do use to help shepherd nosy people out of the Z&A workshop. I'm not sure why I've not posted it here yet.

As with many of the scripts I've posted on my blog, this was done as an experiment, just to get to know how these things work. There are, of course, some very sophisticated security systems out there; I imagine there's even some really nice free ones too. But I wanted to have a go at writing a simple one myself and what you see below is the result.

To use it, all you need to do is create a prim and drop the script inside. Create a notecard called "Security" and also drop that in the prim. The notecard is what configures the security script. There are two types of setting for the notecard: "Owner=" and "Access=". The owner setting (one per line) lets you set up the list of people who can turn the security system on and off (by touching the prim). The access setting lets you set up the list of people who simply have have access. People who aren't on the owner or access list will be sent home when they come in range of the prim.

You can also set the rage (in meters) with "range=" and the frequency of the scans (in seconds) with "frequency=". Note that only avatars over land you own will be ejected -- this means it's safe to have a range that might extend out of parts of the plot being covered.

Also note that if the land is owned by a group, the object that contains the script will also have to be deeded to the group to work.

Here's an example notecard:

Owner = Antony Fairport
Owner = Zardia Avindar
Access = Zanda Slacker

And here's the script itself:

Play sounds when walking (updated)

I've just uploaded an update to the simple script I wrote that plays a sound when you walk. This change takes running to be the same as walking. So, no matter if you're running or walking, and no matter how often you transition between the two states, the sound keeps on playing. Only when you're neither running nor walking does the sound stop.

Of course, as before, it's not a very sophisticated approach -- doubtless most people would have a need for different sounds for different movement speeds -- but it works for me as I don't have a visible run. I've got my AO configured so I'm either walking or walking a bit faster.

Here's the updated code:

Season Lag

A little earlier I was attempting to get over to The Velvet Thorn for a live performance. SL seemed to have other ideas, which was a bit annoying. Generally I'm kind of reclusive, enjoying tinkering with stuff in the Z&A workshop, but after having worked a good few hours today on something I decided I should make the effort to stop being so damn anti-social and actually go do a thing.

Live music sounded like just the thing.

But, like I said, SL seemed to have other plans for me. The first three attempts to get to the venue resulted in either rezzing problems or just a general failure to properly connect to the sim (or something like that -- you know the sort of thing, money turns to ??? in the viewer, parcel details show the last location, profiles don't load, etc...). Finally, with the help of Miss Eve to guide me in (no, really, things were so slow for me she sort of helped talk me to a spot I could safely sit on), I got there. And a bloody good performance it was too.

Miss Eve did comment that it was probably the infamous SL Sunday lag, possibly made worse by more people being online because, in many parts of the world, it's a holiday weekend. That seemed like a reasonable explanation.

Only after the gig, when I got home, did I realise just how bad an impact this Sunday was having on SL. Stood outside my shop was the Easter Bunny, apparently lagging back to Christmas with their costume. ;-)

In case you're wondering, yes, that is one of our bunny hoods. Not sure about the glow though. We don't make them glow.