Artificial Boy

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WEB-678: 200+ Barely-used last names retired after only 18 days; only 100 new names released to offset them Read the rest…

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I have not been able to compile libsecondlife since before Release 0.3. This bothers me. I want to see if any improvements to libsecondlife can make my SLNameWatch bot communicate more efficiently with the grid, or be less prone to crashing. It bothers me that I haven’t been able to compile a fresh checkout of libsecondlife since 2007-07-11. It still works, I guess, with a stream of unhandled events. But, I feel bad that I’m connecting to the grid with such an old version of libsecondlife. In any case, someday it’s going to suddenly completely not work anymore, and SLNameWatch.com will suffer for it. So, I’m on a mission to fix this. I will post my adventure here. Read the rest…

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Will Linden Lab® please stop fiddling with the Join Now pages? New feature: visitors to Join Now have about a 1 in 20 chance of seeing ~150 names instead of just 40. Well, that’s nice and all, but its not persistent. Reload the page, and you get a different list, usually with just 40 shuffled names in it as we’ve come to expect. This is yet another barrier to getting two accounts with the same last name (i.e., for extended-duration, family role-play). Read the rest…

Some friends have asked me “When will you release more baby blocks?” To be honest, the original ADZ baby block freebie was just a 3D representation of my 2D logo, which simply spells my first name. I never intended to make a complete baby block set. Read the rest…

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As I discussed in my article LL Changes Join Now Page Again, on 2008-03-14, LL made an unannounced change to their Join Now page. No longer are all available last names listed in a drop-down. Instead, only 60 of the 1000-2000 currently available last names are given as choices. Why Linden Lab has made this change is unclear, and I won’t dare speculate. In any case, this new policy can make it difficult to join the game with a certain last name. You might want to do this if, for instance, you and a friend or partner want to create new characters (brothers, perhaps?) that share a last name. Or you might see a newly-born character with a cool last name in the game, and want to make a character with that name too. So, how can one create an character with a certain last name, given this new, frustrating barrier? Read the rest…

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From the perspective of the SLNameWatch.com script I use to determine if LL has added new last names, it looks like names are being rapidly created and retired. I have a working theory. I think LL might have changed their policy so that only a random subset of the last names appear in the drop-down at a time. Refresh the page, and the list changes, even though nothing has really changed as far as overall name availability. This is really going to confuse the script I use to determine if the name list has changed! I write resilient code, but I have to say this is something i didn’t plan for. I determine last name availability based on this drop-down. Read the rest…

Everyone else is doing it. And, NWN has set a deadline of midnight tonight for our official predictions for SL 2008. Naturally, my 10 predictions focus around what I know best: the child avatar community, last names, software development, and virtual finance. Hey! The convergence makes total sense, to me. . Read the rest…