Don’t forget to mosey on over to Second Life for all the St. Patrick’s Day festivities.
Just enter St. Patrick’s Day in the search box and away you go. Need to be awearin’ a bit of the green? XStreetSL.com has just what you’re looking for. See y’all in Second Life!
–Monet Netizen
Most impressive, computer-generated fire/smoke particles you've seen? #
@leeodden Is “Digitial” intentional on your Twitter Bio? I'm reading your 11 Best URL Shortening post right now. in reply to leeodden #
Recently discovered VoiceThread. Multimedia slideshow. Very fun to narrate the stories behind pictures! http://cli.gs/voicethread #
Was the Fringe Theme strongly influenced by Night Stalker?: First, I'm not going to use the term “rip-o.. http://tinyurl.com/7v2zxe #
mantoid: Torley posted a photo: http://tinyurl.com/9m47ak #
Pony self-help guru: COLT OF PERSONALITY #
@MilesPeyton I'm not the right person to ask, but if your troubles continue, please contact http://secondlife.com/support Best of hope! in reply to MilesPeyton #
@delchoness GREAT example. Oh my. in reply to delchoness #
@merrycalliope Melons to hold your melons! in reply to merrycalliope #
@Petalice Something like a diorama, but larger. in reply to Petalice #
@lonelydragon Thx for the lead. This sounds like am ambitious cat. in reply to lonelydragon #
@kerryank Scratched up my wife like mad but then he licked his chops, lots, and he's calmed down now. We kept speaking soothingly to him. in reply to kerryank #
Adventure: gave my cat a bath. #
I am the type of guy that often substitutes em dashes for semicolons. #
I want to get a little shopkeeper stall for my cat. Make him into one of those RPG characters selling potions. Any ideas? #
“Give birth” and “repeatedly” are two things not commonly found in the same sentence. #
An open letter to open letters: Dear open letters, if you were closed, I wouldn't respond. Thanks for being open, like a 7-11 but papery. #
ableton_live6_logo.304234549_std.jpg (JPEG Image, 500
First, I'm not going to use the term “rip-off”. I know while that attracts attention, I'm not into lame linkbation, and would rather not accuse someone sans merit. I prefer to ask questions and learn more to make an informed decision.
Numerous people, including myself, have observed that the Fringe Theme (incidentally one of my fave pieces of music which I performed a piano version of) is strongly reminiscent of Philip Glass' style. However, I was unable to pin it to a specific work until just now — ah, serendipity.
I'll explain the chain of events so you can better understand my thought processes:
I was on io9 reading about a new TV series called Warehouse 13, which bears similarities to that magnum opus of paranormal investigations, The X-Files.
Obviously, other commenters called that out, and I remarked that Fringe was just getting out from the X-Files' shadow.
I mused about earlier influences, such as Kolchak: The Night Stalker, then looked it up on Wikipedia.
Intrigued by the description of Kolchak's theme music, I searched on YouTube, and the first hit was uncannily similar to… you know what!
Turns out this is actually the theme to the Night Stalker remake, which came out in 2005, was shortly discontinued afterwards, but nonetheless, predates Fringe.
Googling around, I found this claim that the theme was by Philip Glass.
Sure enough, here's an official acknowledgement.
What makes it juicier: Frank Spotnitz, who wrote for X-Files, was also behind Night Stalker. And in turn, Fringe is frequently cited as an X-Files-ish show.
All that being connected together, have a listen and let me know what you think:
Fringe Theme
Night Stalker Theme
Dynamics and some of the instrumentation are different; the former is more upbeat and march-like. But the ostinatos (compare 0:17 of Fringe to 0:11 of Night Stalker), similar chord progression, and their root ending tones (C minor and A minor, respectively) all make me wonder if JJ Abrams was familiar with this Glass work — composed specifically for Night Stalker and not a freestanding piece, mind you — before penning the Fringe Theme.
So far, I've found only one other voice mentioning this, and a few noting the similarity of some Muse songs. Well, Muse of course is influenced by Glass, as was made evident in a recent Watchmen trailer. (Mmmm… connections!)
I'd love to shed more light on this mystery. What do you think, and do you have further clues to assist in this investigation?
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I'd like to know. Ableton Live now ranks a foremost piece of music production software. Containing both brilliant innovations like “elastic audio” and more conventional approaches (you've still got knobs and sliders), it emerged on the scene 7-odd years ago and generated controversial reactions. Some decried it as yet another music app with its own weird UI, which would make it hard to adopt. Others pragmatically dug into it, lauding its ability to bridge studio composition with live performance (hence the name).
Along the way, Ableton Live's maintained its core look which may be timeless in its neutrality, but added many wanted features: VST plugin support (and integrated instruments, some built in partnership with AAS) and myriad workflow improvements chief among them. Live has also teased with areas not historically expected of it: for instance, while Live is often highly-regarded for electronic (TECHNO!!!!) music, they also sell an Orchestral Instrument Collection. Remix's review of Live 6 nails it:
Throughout the program's version history, Ableton has done a great job keeping its customers informed through expansive beta-testing campaigns and heavily active user forums. By maintaining open communication with customers, Ableton has managed to not only improve its software, but also to do so in exactly the ways real users need most. The latest version, Live 6, has so many new improvements, it's hard to know where to start. But thankfully, amidst the mass of new functionality, Ableton kept the interface fluid and intuitive, helping to bring Live to a whole new level of usability and flexibility.
So that's one weighty stone in Live's storied history, and a constant with the best companies: being customer-friendly. After all, if your product or service doesn't meet their needs, they'll leave.
Coinciding with the NAMM '09 music show, Ableton Live 8 was announced (thanx for the scoop, Synthtopia!), with highlights like integration with Max/MSP (could this bring these more geeky tools into a broader audience?), Internet collaboration, and improved hardware synergy in the form of another strong joint venture, the APC40 with Akai. This may easier answer the many who ask “What's the best controller for Ableton Live?” Impressive.
I don't know what Live's marketshare is amongst DAWs. I'd like to find out, tho, because so many hardware devices (like most of M-Audio's line and the Korg nanos) are bundled with a copy of Live Lite and/or a coupon to save some bucks. This certainly lured me in, and despite its comparatively high price, Live seems to be omnipresent. It's also gone from the underground to the mainstream in the best of ways, with artists like Sasha and Daft Punk using Macs (in themselves a potent sign of pop culture) to energize the masses.
Video by eston
It's a rarity, a mongrel, a bastard child, if you will: at its core, Live is seriously nerdy. One look at the interface and you may be reminded of Star Trek's LCARS. It doesn't feel warm and cuddly. But in its stark, minimal form (which is recolorable), Live calls inspiration from the musician controlling it, and like silent protagonists in RPGs, doesn't overwhelm with a personality of its own. I certainly think that's part of the magic. Live is also a tremendous rarity, in that something so weird could catch on with more “casual” musicians like guitarists who don't want to mess with massive mixing desks, but do want to loop some tunes and explore their creativity.
Live's branding is impeccable: swirly vector shapes have graced the box art for some time, and it's no coincidence that since early versions, inside the boxes are stickers to further spread the brand. That's something you don't see with many softwares. Tangentially, tutorial courses have also popped up, a testament to the people wanting to learn Live.
Live exists at the crossroads of all this as a successful fusion: linear arranger, idea pad, live remixer, and more. One can't simply find another piece of kit which does all this, and so well. And that's not just a testament to my personal fondness (having recently purchased Live 7), it's an observation that I wish more products were so well-done. Other products exist which provide some competition, but with different focus: Sony ACID can also be loops-centric, but it's definitely not cut out for rigorous touring. I prefer some parts of ACID's UI as it's very much like Sony Vegas, my fave NLE, but alas, ACID isn't cross-platform. That's again where Live wins, because it supports both Windows and Mac, desktop and laptop.
All this is a lesson centrally relevant to social media marketing. But those circles tend to ignore or be unaware of pro audio, and I spot this bridge between “those worlds”. Clearly there's ample amounts of word-of-mouth, the same sort of passion I exemplify here: “OMG YOU GOTTA TRY LIVE!”
All that being said, though, sometimes you just gotta shut up and jam!
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It’s officially time to do a reality check on all of your passwords.
Did you see the chaos when high-profile Twitter accounts were recently hijacked and used to send out messages in the names of those folks? How embarrassing.
Cre
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ating a Great Password
So, how many of us are using passwords from the list of 500 worst passwords?
Now that you know that “password” isn’t a good choice, here are a few tips for creating a password worth using.
No real words = important. As you saw on the list of 500 worst passwords, most of them are real words, which can be cracked by fraudsters with very little effort. Avoid real words that can be found in a dictionary (in any language) or any proper nouns.
Long passwords = essential. The fewer the characters, the easier it is to compromise. Choose a memorable password that’s at least 8 characters long. To make it even stronger, make it a “pass phrase” instead of a password. “brownfox” is borderline. “thequickbrownfox” is better.
Mixed case = good. This adds another level of difficulty for fraudsters to guess your password. Try changing “thequickbrownfox” to “TheQuickBroWnFox.”
Misspelled = better. While your English teacher wouldn’t approve, misspelling your passwords is a great way to add complexity: “ThuhQueekBroWnFoxE.”
Added numerals and symbols = best. You could mix some numbers in there like “ThuhQueekBr0WnF0
Linden Lab is pleased to announce results for Q4 and 2008. User hours increased by 61% over 2007, highlighting the tremendous growth rate in user engagement that Second Life maintained throughout 2008. User hours increased steadily each quarter, culminating in a record-setting 112 million user hours in Q4. In addition:
• Peak concurrent users were up 31% over 2007
• Land owned by Residents increased 82% over 2007
• Exchange Volume increased 33% over 2007
• User-to-user transactions in Q4 increased 54% over Q4 of 2007.
Financially 2008 was an outstanding year for the company fro
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m a profitability and cash flow perspective. We are in a strong position to weather the economic downturn while continuing to invest in the Second Life platform.
Looking at Q4 in more detail:
Q4 user hours grew 47% from the same quarter last year. In Q4, Residents spent 112 million hours in Second Life which was an increase of 9% from Q3. Peak concurrent users of 76,000 grew 6.7% over Q3 and approximately 30% over Q4 of last year.
Second Life land mass increased 82% over 2007. At the end of 2008, Residents owned 1.76 billion square meters of land. Our revised policy of Openspaces pricing and the introduction of Homesteads, as announced in late October, resulted in a land mass contraction of approximately 10% from Q3, as expected. The rollout of our Homestead product proceeded as we planned. Based on Resident feedback and the resultin
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g purchases, conversions and cancellations, we believe the changes we made to the product line incorporated the concerns of the majority of our Residents and will provide a better experience for all.
Approximately 2,700 Openspace regions were combined to convert into a quarter of the number of full regions. We added 675 full regions and approximately 9,250 Homesteads. Only about 300 or 2% of the original Openspaces remained Openspaces, conforming to the limits that the Openspace product was originally intended to support. Just under 1,200 Openspace regions were returned to Linden Lab. Due to the impact of the conversions (four Openspaces for one full region) and the returns, Openspaces decreased by 3,900 which will reduce the overall landmass in Q1, as anticipated when we made the product change. Upgrades more than offset the decrease in unit count. (Note that some of the conversions occurred in January and are not fully reflected in the year-end numbers.)
Full regions will provide the best Resident experience, and we think that the expanded product line, which now includes Openspaces, Homesteads and full regions, provides a better product mix and end-user experience for Residents. As we continue to refine our land offerings, we look forward to being able to support a lower priced full region offering along with a premium full region for higher load situations.
User-to-user transactions increased 54% from Q4 2007. In Q4, Residents again spent more than $100 million USD on virtual goods and services in Second Life. After extraordinary growth in Q3 (transactions increased by more than 21% over Q2), we saw a slight decline (1%) in Q4. Volume on the LindeX, our virtual currency exchange where users can buy and sell our inworld micro-payment currency, grew 22% from the same quarter in 2007 to $27 million USD but is also a slight decline from Q3. It’s possible that the decline in Q4 was driven by uncertainty in the land market created by the pricing and configuration changes or simply that the economy overheated slightly in September when we saw significant growth in volume.
Thanks to all of our Residents for another successful year. Given the state of the real world economy, we are pleased with our re
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sults in 2008. We look forward to continued expansion and development of Second Life in 2009. I will be available in the forum discussion and answering questions there as I have in the past. I look forward to discussing the numbers and these changes with you.
Funny creatures we humans are: when we're stuck with technological constraints, oh how we lament them. But once they're surpassed and we know we can do better, we long for the “good old days”. Why, witness vinyl, Polaroids, and retro-computing for that matter: older computers are practically obsolete for modern computational tasks, but for playing “abandonware” games and reliving our youth (part of it, anyway), they're as needed as flour for a cake.
The Commodore 64 was my first computer, and every now and then, I have a yearning to make my current, 16.7+ million-color images look pixelated, dithered, and crushed into the horizontally-stretched limitations of 16 colors. I used to weep when I discovered GEOS Paint could only fit 2 colors into each one of its 8
UIUC GSLIS and Alliance Library System are pleased to offer a series of non-credit continuing education courses for librarians, educators, and others interested in libraries, museums, learning and teaching in virtual worlds such as Second Life. Classes available include: Second Life 101, Second Life 102, Virtual World Librarianship, Setting Up an Educational Presence in Second Life, Working with a Class in Second Life, Setting up your Library or Museum in Second Life: An Applied Approach, Instructional Tools For Second Life, and a seminar on Virtual Worlds and Libraries seminar. Courses meet for 4-6 weeks and everyone is welcome! For more information and to register, go to http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/programs/cpd/VW/. For more information, contact Marianne Steadley at steadley@uiuc.edu, or call 217-244-3302. Course descriptions are on the website.
My favorite backup program used to be Acronis True Image. I've used it ever since I got a copy of version 8 sometime back, and it's saved my butt several times when I needed to do a total restore. However, due to bungling customer service and sheer unhelpfulness — in addition to a faulty 2009 version — I can't recommend it anymore.
Last month, I bought Acronis True Image 2009 because version 8 began acting unreliably on my Windows XP system. This followed a long time where it served me loyally, and like an upgrade should be, I was hoping 2009 would be noticeably better. It certainly looks sleeker, bearing a faux Vista look even if you're on XP.
But that's where I was wrong: it crashed unpredictably when trying to create new tasks and also failed erratically on occasional nights when backing up. A backup program which is inconsistent compromises (and I hesitate to use stronger words here) your peace of mind.
In good faith, I did deep research on the forums and knowledge base, and did the usual things like a clean reinstall. But to no avail. By this time, I had already found a better solution (if you've been following my blog, you can infer what it is). So I wrote to Acronis per their Refund Policy. This was shortly after the holidays, so I understood a slow response. I also wanted to be respectful of what it said in their autoreply:
Please do not submit your request more than once; multiple submissions generate extra paperwork that simply slows down response times.
However, this seemed like an awfully long time. So I wrote to a different email address, acronis@digitalriver.com, which I had gotten a reply to earlier. What about?
Well that's another shady thing: their online checkout charged me sales tax me without telling me the specific total first — it was only until after I completed my transaction that I knew the exact amount.
I asked them:
I recently purchased Acronis True Image 2009 and it said the total was
US$49.99, but after I checked out, I was billed for $54.19.
They said:
The charge that you are referring to is the applicable sales tax for the
purchase. On the shopping basket page of the order it states that sales
tax is charged for orders shipped to California, Minnesota and
Washington. Sales tax is automatically computed on both product(s) and
shipping costs. Also, for International Orders it states that pursuant
to the Digital VAT Directive, as of 1st July 2003, European customers
will be charged VAT on all downloadable digital products and services,
including software at 15.0%.
To be fair, they prompted me beforehand that I would be charged for sales tax. Still, I should've received final confirmation, as I do on… every single other online shopping site I've been to. 4-odd bucks isn't a big deal, but there's no excuse for not being an ethical merchant.
It goes downhill from there…
I finally heard back shortly after. I'll omit the support person's name because this post isn't about individual humiliation, and having worked support extensively, I have an appreciation for when it's done well (as well as a severe distaste for when it's handled poorly). I think he was trying to be helpful, but sounded as if he was reading from a script, sending me robo-email after robo-email despite my insistence on a refund, and my disinterest in trying to solve my True Image 2009 problems — both because I had already churned through that and I found a better solution.
I made my request 4 times, each time to receive a reply telling me generic steps to diagnose the problem, with no acknowledgment of my refund request. Unbelievable but true. The tone was totally lacking in personality and its disconnectedness was off-putting. I felt ignored and upset.
Instead of banging my head against a I'M-NOT-LISTENING! brick wall, I decided to return to Acronis' support site and use the live chat option. I was asked, “Do you want to give a last chance to our product?”, to which I said “No thanks.” I'm empathic to the fact that support reps aren't telepaths, and while parts of my customer history can be shared in their CRM tools, other context isn't. I was extremely frustrated by this point, but did my best to be polite. I was then told the issue would be escalated, and shortly thereafter:
We have forwarded your refund request to the Refunds Department for
review. You will be contacted within 10 business days with approval or
denial of your request. If your order is approved for refund, you will
receive proper information on how to complete the refund process.
This looks a lot more inefficient and slow than it needs to be. What's the criteria? We'll see what happens.
Also, approval or denial? Nowhere in the refund policy does it mention that. Acronis, you need to state these terms upfront. Otherwise, it's dishonesty by omission, and that doesn't help the customer make an informed buying decision.
Anyway, this has really stained and soured Acronis for me. It's not an isolated incident, of course — before purchase, I googled and found similar complaints to the situation I've fallen into. Some of them were really rude ranting which isn't helpful, and I dismissed others on the grounds that Acronis True Image 8 was such an excellent product… so what could go wrong? Apparently, a lot. It also reinforces my belief that even if a product is wonderful, customer service needs to be as well, or when you're in a hard place, things will really suck.
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Back with the monthly grid update. Its been a bumpy few weeks, with Level 3 outages, and central database issues. The good news is that LLnet (data center fiber network) continues ahead of schedule and we should be starting traffic migration in the next week. We’ve also made some
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headway in the area of asset storage. Right now, central database issues are our core focus and have been at the center of most of the recent grid problems.
LLnet
The benefits of LLnet are to not only get us off of our dependency on VPN’s for inter data center traffic, but also lay the foundation for diverse internet providers that will allow us to handle an outage on a single provider (currently Level 3) and potentially improve latency. Most of our widespread and highest impacting outages have been network related, and that is why LLnet has been my top priority since joining Linden Lab this past summer. I expect final testing to be complete by the end of January, and production traffic cutover immediately after.
Improving Asset Storage
In the meantime, we have also been working to significantly reduce load on the Isilon storage clusters. I know that last month I indicated that we would discuss this more and wanted to touch on our strategy with storage. We’ve actually been working in a tiered storage environment for a number of months. The Isilons act as our primary means of storage, for those assets that are accessed on a more regular basis.
As you may imagine, however, most assets are either accessed very infrequently, or not at all. To determine how often assets are used, we’ve been running a detailed “collectionR
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21; process. This process identifies those rarely used (or dead) assets and moves them to bulk storage, off of the primary Islion hardware. This is of primary importance to the stability of the Isilons, as we have been pushing the storage limits of these clusters, and a large number of assets in the “not frequently accessed” category have been taking up critical capacity. So moving these to bulk storage will not only provide us the necessary headroom and improved reliability, it will properly place assets on the right type of storage (depending on usage). We’ve also been using file compression on the Isilons as a “mid-tier” storage category, where we can maintain assets in the Isilons, for faster access, but minimize actual space used.
HTTP Dataserver and Agent Inventory Services
A quick update on a couple of our data access layer projects – HTTP Dataserver and Agent Inventory Services. Both of these projects are close to completion, you may recall from my previous posts that we are trying to simplify messaging protocols between the Simulators and back end databases (HTTP Dataserver), as well as messaging from databases to the viewer (Agent Inventory Services.) Implementation is dependent on a central server code release we expect will be deployed by the end of January, followed by these two projects for release in February. Also, expect a follow on blog post from one of our infrastructure leads, Sardonyx Linden, giving more details on our data architecture direction.
Read about the Central Database in January post
Finally, I’ve purposely not addressed our database issues, as I want to spend the January update on that component of infrastructure. Our central database has been a source of instability the past few weeks, and we have been spending considerable time investigating root cause issues. Given the complicated nature of the service, none of these issues have been easy to identify, but I’m expecting that we will have answers over the next few weeks, and I’ll comment on the issue in the forum thread. Please post your Grid related questions for me there.
Frank
