First, download the libraries package. This file contains libraries and headers needed for building a viewer, as well the SLVoice binary.

Uncompress the file.
In linden/indra/newview/vivox-runtime/i686-linux/ you’ll find all the voice files.

If you run the standard viewer downloaded from secondlife.com:
Copy SLVoice into the installation directory
Copy the rest into the lib directory

If you build your own viewer and run it from the source tree:
Copy SLVoice into indra/newview
Copy the rest into libraries/i686-linux/lib_release_client

Now if you start the viewer, voice should work. This is of course experimental, and might crash, but it seems to work a lot better than the Wine hack did.

The PSU made several loud exploding noises, and bright sparks could be seen inside. Pretty scary stuff since this happened the moment I plugged the cable in, so I had my hand right near the thing. Lights went out.

I unplugged the cable, and turned things back on. Fortunately, the UPS it was connected to survived fine. Inside the server nothing looks obviously burned up, but since this is an ATX case, the PSU provides power even when the computer is supposed to be off, so something might have got fried.

The server will remain down for some hours, as it’s late here and no shops are open. If I’m lucky, and only the PSU died then it’ll go back up as soon as I get a new one, otherwise it could unfortunately take a few days, as I may not be able to get replacement hardware on the same day.

TrustNet won’t be working while the server is broken. If you’re constantly getting errors, reset the scanner. It should fail to login and then shut up. The downtime will be credited towards your subscription when it comes back online.

To set it up, first get the viewer, then configure the stereo mode in the advanced graphics settings:

The new 1.18.3.5.285 has no new functional changes, but has an improved installer. Now it should work on Vista and will uninstall correctly. Some files also had the line endings fixed, which means the .zip now has less files, and the installer will work a bit faster as it won’t have to download files that didn’t actually change.

blocking avatar scanner on SL
make a second life particle spammer

To the people searching for the former, there’s no way to block my avatar scanner, so don’t bother trying.

To the ones searching for the latter, shame on you. My latest work is precisely on dealing with particle spam, and I believe I’m making pretty good progress there. There are big changes in this area yet to come, which I hope will make a difference.

To use the .zip, first install the right original version (there’s a link to it on sl.daleglass.net). Extract the .zip to the installation directory, overwriting any existing files, then run DaleGlassRelease.exe.

This version has a much more functional, but still unfinished Event Log screen, and an updated list of regions for the IM location logger.

Turns out it’s WordPress’ fault. My login page fetches the RSS feed from this blog to display the latest blog entries. The feed used to be this one, so that it would only show the SL related news. But WordPress broke that for some reason, and that made the login page fail to work.

I set it to the full feed, which means unrelated things may appear on the login page ocassionally.

In other news, I’m working on a new feature to make it possible to very quickly figure out the source of particle spam/griefing and deal with it. The new screen gathers statistics on particle effects, measures their relative “annoyance factor” based on the amount of screen space they take, and allows to perform actions like moving the camera to the source, banning the owner, etc.

Here’s a screenshot of what this looks like during an attack. The 3 boxes on the right automatically display the 3 most active effects.

This is the viewer I use 99% of the time, so it should work well. Please contact me if you have any problems with it.

The new feature is that now there’s a checkbox in the chat history to enable logging of the owners of talking objects, as well as the location if available. This helps track down objects that spam or that are cleverly hidden somewhere they’re hard to find. It will also tell you the owner and the location of an object IMing you, so even if there’s an object on some entirely different part of the grid, you’ll be able to know who owns it, and where it is.

Here’s what this looks like:

[12:00] Some Object: Hi there! [(requesting) at secondlife://Ahern/128/100/50]
[12:01] Some Object is owned by Dale Glass
[12:05] Some Object: Test [Dale Glass at secondlife://Ahern/128/100/50]

The (requesting) part is because the viewer can’t always know instantly somebody’s name. It may need to ask the grid who owns the object and then may still need to ask what’s their name. So to avoid losing information, if it doesn’t know it tells you it’s looking it up, then adds the data to the history as soon as it finds out.

The location part took some work to get working. If the object is using normal chat and found nearby, then the viewer can easily tell you where it is. Nothing mysterious here. However, if it’s sending IMs from some other sim entirely, then things are a bit more complicated. The IM includes the region’s key and coordinates. However, there’s no way at the time to convert a region key to the sim’s name.

So what I did was spending a couple of days writing a bot with libsecondlife and made it teleport through the whole grid gathering data. That is about 13000 sims. The generated database is then shipped with the viewer, and currently includes about 10000 sims, so it’s slightly incomplete. This will be fixed soon. Private sims probably will never appear on it, as the bot must be able to connect to the sim to get the key. But there’s still data for most of the grid there.

Unfixed problems

Unfortunately this functionality doesn’t work 100%, though not entirely due to my fault.

Owner lookups may fail if the speaking object is being worn. This seems to be a problem with the grid which doesn’t return the data for avatar attachments. LL could probably fix that one, but that may take time.

And as mentioned above, due to the way used to translate sim keys to names, sometimes a name won’t be found. This should be mostly fixed by the next release with an updated sim key database.