MechanizedLife

A couple of people with high traffic collectors noticed some oddities with their StatsCollectors in regards to avatar ages and payment statuses. While it took me some time to track down it turns out that a super elegant way I had of collecting said information failed in certain cases (less than 10% of the time). While the problem was not major and was spread out enough to make it not much more than a nusaince, it weighed on my conscience and I figured out a way to solve it over the last week.

I’ve had the fix in place since late Friday or so and have been monitoring it since. Its a solution that scales well, that requires no replacement objects to you the customer, and keeps the number of failures to under 1% (.001% for ages and .02% for payment status at the time of this writing) with the minimal scale on my end.

Thanks to all of you who pointed out such anomolies and paitently awaited corrections, we understand that you help us make our product better, just as you understand that sometimes the world we all know as Second Life throws some unexpected hurdles.

Now that that is going well, look for some future improvements for this product coming soon.

Following up on suggestions from customers, Ali has tweaked the RSS Feed from her StatsCollectors to include even more profile information, including the option of seeing profile pix in the listings of visitor names. You can click through to get detailed profile information for each visitor. Also, the various options for which you needed to scroll to the bottom of the listings has been duplicated on top of the page!

No, it’s not Sweetness, the product I posted on Ali! It’s the deli.cio.us Tagger! Del.icio.us is the queen of social bookmarking sites, owned by Yahoo! and host to more than 100 million bookmarked URLs. As if you didn’t know! Well, the MechanizedLife del.icio.us Tagger is a great way for you to add Second Life URLs (or SLurls) to your del.icio.us account. Just rez it and right click on it to Edit the SETTINGS file in its Content folder. Add your account name and password and preferred channel for handling tagging to the card, and save it. After that, you only need to type “/15 tag” (or whatever you set the channel number to) and the parcel you’re avatar is in will be added to your del.icio.us account. You can even add tags to the command (e.g. “/15 tag SecondLife MechanizedLife”), which is the most valuable social aspect of the bookmarking site.

Find this product at the following locations: Chindogu and Clever Zebra. Or you can purchase it online at SLExchange or onRez for yourself or as a gift.

I originally posted this on my other blog, but it is also relevant here.

I’ve made some changes to the way group sign-ups are managed. Basically before I had a sign, put the group name in the notecards for everything, and crossed my fingers that you all saw it. Some of you did, and that’s great, but I wanted something a little less of a hassle so I invested in a program that would automate group invites so that when you touch the sign you’ll get an invite.

Of course, being a scripter I couldn’t resist taking it a step futher and now when you purchase an item from me in world, through SL Exchange, or through OnRez, you will automatically get a group invite.

I also spent a little bit of time and built a building I had in my head for a little while and couldn’t decide what it was until it hit me that I saw people shopping there so I turned it into a shopping venue. If you have something you want to sell and need a place to get started, or you need a satellite location, come check it out. You can get 100 prims per week for L$150. I’ve set it up so each store has its own little plot, making it extremly customizable with your title, description, music, etc, etc.

See you there.

Unfortunately a service outage has hit my hosting facility and the Stats Collectors are not working. I have been assured that the service will be restored soon, but I do not have any idea of how long it will take them to rebuild the server.

I apologize for the inconvenience and rest assured I am doing all I can to make it as short an outage as possible.

Of course I totally forgot to update the blog when the issue was resolved on Monday….

So while not completely done with my new sim, Chindogu, I’ve decided to put the first group of lots up for sale. I say the first group because I decided to just set 6 plots up for sale, all on the south side of the sim, all 1024 sq. m. and all double prim (468 per 1024, L$ 6498/month); I’ll be making other lots available as they fill up. Every plot (now and future) have road access on at least one side, and some have access to the centralized park. Every renter will also have use of the community facilities in the NE Corner of the sim.

If you want a different plot, let me know I chose these at random and am willing to do different plots. Even if you decide not to rent, stop by and let me know what you think.

As mentioned in Ali’s personal blog, she’s been busy! Following suggestions from users as well as the vision she has always had for her first product, version 2.0 of the CogHUD makes it a true standalone product as well as makes it even more useful in conjunction with the kiosks and event board. Here are the new features:

• Display of events
• AM/PM Option
• Popup Reminders
• Sound Reminders
• Snooze Function
• Customizable Reminder Times

In the HUD itself, you have a mini version of the CogBoard that provides four lines of current events along with previous | stop | next option arrows.  The HUD now includes a SETTINGS notecard for handling AM/PM options, popup reminders alerting you to events and the ability to snooze the alert, use of sound for the alerts. This update also puts the HUD in the automatic upgrade system Ali uses for distributing updates of products.

You’ve already read that Ali is in the process of moving the MechLife store to her own sim and a great new building! But she’s been busy in other ways as well! If you click on over to the ML Wiki , you will see a new page featuring requests for features. This information is being pulled from our issues document where we record handling customer complaints and suggestions. It’s even color-coded to what’s Under Consideration, Planned, In Progress, and Done. Some exciting improvements are in store, particularly in regard to the Cog products!

If you check the list for #19, you’ll find one that’s just recently completed: “Allow displaying of multiple feeds for comparison,” which is so cool we got rid of the office ice machine! The is graph basically allows you to compare up to four feeds on the same graph. If you have four difference entrances to your store, or four different stores, you can compare the number of visitors to each sensor! If you have more than four, a list with choice boxes appears to let you choose which feeds will go into the graph. Check out her example stats site and play with the choices.

Just another way Ali is tweaking and improving her gadgets … and paying attention to her customers!

April 17: Even as I was posting this article, Ali was doing some debugging as well as adding the ability to download a comma delimited CSV Extract of the data! (You can find it at the bottom of the example page cited above.) How cool is that?

We’re going to experience an interruption of service on our hosting platform for our StatsCollectors and CogCalendar Products this weekend. Here’s the word from our “host” …

“We’ve been very diligent in planning the move of our data center and we’re on schedule with all preparations. Our primary target date for the relocation of all servers is the end of next week: Midnight, Friday, March 28^th. At that time, for a period of up to 48 hours, there will be service unavailability. It is not certain when your account will become unavailable or how fast it will come back up. Please allow ample time for us to make the move safely and securely.

“I know I’m asking a lot of you and am truly thankful for your patience. You can expect significant service improvements with this move. It is likely that most accounts will only be down a portion of the allotted 48-hour window.

“Once your site is up and online, you can rest confidently knowing that it is hosted in a brand-new high tech Data Center. With multiple large, ultra-fast connections to the Internet, a state-of-the-art power grid and redundancy systems and high-capacity cooling, the new Ecommerce Data Center is the place to be for your website, for years to come.”

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this will cause you, but are hopeful you can appreciate how service should be much improved after this weekend’s hurdle is cleared!

It started with IMs from Zania Turner at Starfleet Command, SL Quadrant, who’d bought a CogBoard for handling events at one of the premier RP sims in Second Life. I helped her get the board up and running; pretty soon I get an IM from a colleague of hers, who handles Starfleet training events! Wow! They run close to 250 events over a two-week period! The server and board have never been so heavily tested! This sent Ali to the science officer station a few times, required us both to be added as subscribers to the Google calendar handling the Starfleet training events, and pushed us to upgrade the whole product! The big change is that you can now add ONEDAY=TRUE to the settings notecard and have it display the current day’s schedule of events. For the Starfleet board, that’s equivalent to just about anybody else’s two-week interval! The upgrade also made it possible for us to automate sending out future upgrades.

This was all fine and good, but when our new contact at Starfleet ran it, the events for a day one week in advance of the current day would display. WTF? Well, here’s how Ali explained this new glitch:

“Basically, when I ask for all events from a calendar within a certain range, Google returns them to me in reverse order of start date (I have no idea why) so I sort them correctly, translate them into something SL friendly, and send them off to the requesting object (the board’s server, a kiosk, whatever).

“Now a year or more ago when I was writing this, I had to put a limit on the number of events I retrieved from Google and I chose 100. What this meant was that for any one calendar I would get 100 events for the range I specified. This is fine for HUDs (which only retrieve a day’s events at a time), but as you will see in a moment, not great for people with giant calendars.

“Because I was only getting 100 events, and they were in reverse order, Google was only returning me the last 100 events on a calendar in that range. Since kiosks/squares/boards ask for 2 weeks of events at a time they were getting the events at the tail end of that 2-week period. I would sort them, translate, and send them back to SL. It seems the Starfleet calendar has about 250 (maybe more) events in that time frame. So I was getting the last 100, which after sorting started the 24th or so and was sending those to SL. [The day of reference, of course, was the 17th!]

“I’ve upped this number to 500, we’ll see if we need to up it sometime in the future, but the Starfleet calendar should be working now (or, in an hour when the board and server reset themselves). ”

That seemed to do the trick except even then, a few later-in-the-day events got truncated! (This is a problem we expect no one else to experience!) Good grief! I was ready to call in the Klingons to do a preemptive on Starfleet! It turns out that SL has a limitation on the number of characters you can receive from such a feed, so Ali once again had to make some adjustments to refine the amount of information that was going to SL from Google. Problem solved!

We are very glad to have done our part to keep the SL Quadrant safe!