I think that a few things need to be addressed on the blog entry they added called Shenanigans. In the post they say this:

Two weeks ago, amid an atmosphere of pride and boasting about Emerald traffic, a silly idea was hatched.

This idea was to target a blog owned by a creator of a malicious viewer, and boast of the traffic Emerald has captured. The method for doing this was to add links to the Emerald log in page linked to said blog. Each time anyone logged in, our page loaded up and also the other page loaded up – simply to show off our volume of traffic.

This was not a DDoS. This was a poor attempt at boasting that failed miserably. Once we discovered this, these links were deleted and the dev concerned was disciplined.

The entire Emerald Team offers it’s sincere apologies for concern, panic, worry, mistrust and disappointment felt by our users because of this. I can most strongly assure you that this will not happen again.

Sincerely,

The Emerald Dev Team

I call bullshit. From the information I gathered it WAS a DDos attempt (all be it a shitty one) targeted at someone who pissed of Phox and he was retaliating like he has done so many times before. Silly idea really? And the best idea was to say it was targeting a blog of a malicious viewer? Really? Even if it was an attack on a malicious viewer there is no justification for involving a whole community unknowingly in illegal activity such as a DDos. You can call it what you want but thats what it was… a DDos. What good is an apology to someone who got there ISP contacted and their internet shut off because of this “silly idea”. Whether others where involved I don’t know but you do seem to insinuate that the dev team had this idea not one person.

Lets not forget about this blog post way back when that big data mining incident was outed. I over looked this because I figured it was an honest mistake and they had good reason for gathering the data. BUT After seeing time after time the things that are happening I am more then sure that that information would probably have been used improperly and maliciously. Whats to say with this new way of hiding code they don’t do something similar and put even more important information at risk.

Everyone that knows me or reads my blog knows I havent used emerald in a while. At least not faithfully and when I do its the source code pulled from them and compiled myself not a prebuilt binary. I have been using the official SL2 viewer for various reasons. I even posted on it. One of the reasons I didn’t really mention was my growing distrust for the dev team. I try not to listen to drama and gossip but I can’t ignore my personal dealings with people. I have been a very avid emerald user since the beginning of my sl and I love the viewer. But all the events that have been happening have completely killed my trust in the developers of the project. I cannot trust this Phox person and he has access to something that allows him to do whatever he wants without anyone seeing in a viewer we all love. This is not a personal vendetta against Phox I do not know Phox outside of the news he generates and the things he has been accused of.

I suggest everyone make their own judgement on this and not take my word for it but I would be extremely careful using the emerald viewer anymore. At least until Linden labs deals with the situation if they ever do. After all emerald being in the TPV agreement does put LL in some type of liability.

digitalfiz falls asleep at the keyboard at 2am

The one thing I don’t understand is why its any different for me to pull up a chair and sit with friends and talk in a virtual world or to do the same in the real world or why its wrong for me to spend the rest of the night on the computer but ok to watch tv for the rest of the night. I know that some consider the internet to be very impersonal but with places like SecondLife and Blue Mars it can be a very personal experience to interact with someone. In those virtual worlds you are what you want to be and that avatar is you. it’s not just text its something you made personally and the interaction with others is very personal.

I’ve never been a person to blame my problems on some word some doctor made up or decided to call the problem but I will say that the anxiety I feel when I just think about having to deal with people in real life hurts, its not just a fear it physically hurts and it’s just not something I have to deal with this day and time.

When I do think about it, I feel stupid for the things I feel incapable of doing. It’s stupid that when my neighbor catches me outside I feel panic and I have absolutely nothing to say to him but in a virtual world I can meet someone I have never met before in my life and talk with them for hours. It’s stupid that when I go to the store to shop for groceries that my head feels with blood and so much anxiety sets in I can hardly see straight while I try to gather supplies. It is stupid that I get so frustrated just trying to find the groceries I am looking for knowing that I have probably passed what I am looking for 5 times and still cant find it. I feel retarded when I go to the DMV or somewhere that requires you to wait in line or a waiting room and the person sitting next to me looks at me like they want to have a conversation but I cant think of a single thing to say because I am so nervous I can only think about how much longer do I have to sit here.

I will say that this is not always the case. Sometimes if I am preoccupied with a project in my head sometimes I can go to the grocery store or another public place and not have a single problem at all because I am somewhere else in my head. I have tried to use this technique when I go out and it has help a lot but it is very hard to block out the fears that set in. The sad thing is the fears I have are unknown fears. Its not something specific its just fear and anxiety.

I want to say to everyone that tries to explain to me how unnatural it is to live the way I do “trust me I would give anything to not have to deal with what I do everyday.”

Some might say its unhealthy. I say its just like anything else. You are responsible for your health not anyone or anything else. If you eat healthy and get exercise that you will be fine just like with any other things you might consider more normal. I have a belly I have this belly not because I sit on the computer all day, I have it because I sit on this computer all day and choose not to eat healthy or do my morning exercises

Some also might say that you don’t go out and meet people and that you need a normal social life. Who’s job is it to say whats a normal social life? I have more friends online then I could ever imagine having in real life. There is no way I would be able to interact enough and keep up with as many friends I have if it was in person.

The point I am trying to make here is that virtual worlds and the amazing amount of different ways to communicate and entertain yourself on the internet make it easier for people like me have normal lives. yes, I said normal because no matter how weird it seems to you or others its no different then other types of entertainment of communicating. Its not different to spend the night watching tv then it is to spend the night on the computer reading the news or chatting with friends or just goofing off playing some FPS. It’s no different to get up in the morning and check your email, the weather and the news then it is to get up go out your door scratch your balls and pick up the news paper. Its not weird its just a different way of doing things.

Online you can be what you want and who you want without restrictions (well legal restrictions but still ). Online in virtual worlds like SecondLife I am a vampire, I am a builder, I am a mentor and I am a friend to thousands. Out in the real world I am just another person, just another number.

Things I miss from Emerald Viewer:

1. Being able to see someones true online status from their profile
2. The command line features emerald has like: tp2cam, flr, gth and rezplat to name a few.
3. Being able to get UUID’s or people and objects either by viewing profiles or right clicking objects.
4. The preprocessor, currently broke in emerald anyways.
5. The built in AO.

Things I like about Viewer 2:

1. The UI, its just sexy.
2. The favorites bar at the top for landmarks. Removes a whole hud for me and provides a browser like familiarity to the game.
3. Being able to create outfits without having to “copy items”. very useful for no copy items being able to be in multiple outfits.
4. MoAP: media on a prim. Very awesome.
5. Graphics enhancements.
6. The extremely customizable UI. You can pretty much make the internals of the viewer look any way you want.

Things I hate about Viewer 2:

1. The fact that I am having to pretty much relearn my tools again. But who actually likes this anyways?
2. Thats it…

All in all the only reason I am using viewer 2 is because the 3rd party viewers like Emerald are falling behind and have no plans on updating to the new UI. While they do plan on adding some of the features of viewer 2 they refuse the UI like its the plague. It will be their downfall I think.

I wish I could code C++ so I could just take the features I like of Emerald and port them to Viewer 2 but sadly I don’t I do plan on trying to dive into C++ and learn a bit about it maybe learning enough to do what I need with the viewer. I wonder who else has done the same as me and actually gave viewer 2 an honest try…

This does not fix sound for streaming media. That is a separate issue with gstreamer and should only be a problem for 64bit users.

Ok, well I will say that the fix was not easy to find but it is easy to do…. go figure. First off the distributions of secondlife even the newest beta versions and all other variants like Emerald(which I use) and CoolViewer come with an older version of libopenal.1. That also goes for Ubuntu even the newest 9.10(Karmic). I didn’t really research which version they came with I just know its older then the one required for being able to use openal with pulseaudio. Direct pulseaudio support didnt come into openal until 1.10 so up until this point you could possibly get openal to use alsa which pulseaudio has a plugin for. The only problem with the alsa plugin is its unstable and for some reason openal seems to make it scream. Maybe its the load it puts on it or something I don’t know. I do know that VLC using the alsa plugin for pulseaudio studders a little bit but works ok. So the solution to no audio for secondlife in Ubuntu 64bit and really 32bit is to compile a newer version of libopenal which is simple enough. Now for the 32bit version its a little bit easier because you just compile it like normal and move the libopenal.1.11.753 to the lib folder of secondlife and continue from there. Here is the step by step instructions to do so:

• Step 1 – get essentials

  First we need to make sure you have all the essential build material installed like gcc and cmake so liked go ahead and install that stuff:

  # sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libpulse-dev
  for 64bit you need to also install multilib support so that you can compile the 32bit version:
  # sudo apt-get install gcc-4.4-multilib gcc-multilib libc6-dev-i386

• Step 2 – get openal and open it up

  Then we must download the latest openal which at the time of this artical is 1.10.622:

  # wget http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal-releases/openal-soft-1.11.753.tar.bz2
  # tar -jxvf openal-soft-1.10.622.tar.bz2
  # cd openal-soft-1.10.622/build

• Step 3 – compile openal

  This will also be done 2 different ways depending on if your on 32bit or 64bit ubuntu first we show 32bit:

  # cmake ..
  For 64bit version you have to do this:
  # CFLAGS=-m32 LDFLAGS=-m32 cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DLIB_SUFFIX=32
  If you see something like so then it compiled in pulseaudio support:
  – Building OpenAL with support for the following backends:
  –      ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio, WaveFile
  Then we compile(both 32bit and 64bit)
  # make

• Step 4 – back up the old libopenal and copy the new one

  First we need to back up the old libopenal.so.1 just encase this one is messed up. I know, I know it didnt work anyways but still always backing up is a good practice

  # mv /path/to/your/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1 /path/to/your/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1.old
  Then we copy the new one over like so:
  # cp libopenal.so.1.10.622 /path/to/your/secondlife/lib/libopenal.so.1

• Step 5 – making sure openal knows to use pulse as its audio source

  Now because openal defaults to alsa which pulse has a buggy plugin for we must override that with the user config file. The following command assumes you have nothing in the .alsoftrc yet because you really havent messed with it. If you have a .alsoftrc and have settings in it just simply set the drivers to pulse and now anything you may already have using openal will use pulse The only warning I have for this is that if you have other programs that come bundled with libopenal.1 may not have the newest version that supports pulse but you should be able to do the same for that program as you did with secondlife. If it breaks anything just change it back and look for another route or ask the providers of the other software too provide an update.

  # echo “drivers=pulse” > ~/.alsoftrc

Now you should have sound for secondlife You might want to restart your computer to make sure no sort of caching is going on. Remember this does not fix sound for streaming media I am still working on that. I will post and link from this one to the streaming media fix if/when I get one firgured out.