Omega Point

After a couple months of fighting to retrieve data from my ISP, arguing about whether or not I had the right to transfer the LSLwiki.com domain name — and finally buying a new one — followed by a couple days’ worth of messing about with MySQL, I’m pleased to say the LSL Wiki has returned, in editable, “current” form. Your old logins and passwords work.

Everything is the way it was at the moment the wiki went down. Nothing’s changed, we just wanted to get an editable wiki back up, but we have some fixes and addons to be rolled out over the next couple of weeks.

One catch though: this time, it’s at LSLwiki.net. I’ve put up redirects at the old site at LSLwiki.com, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll ever be able to recover that domain and put it to more useful… use.

This announcement comes right on the heels of Milo Linden’s “ohhh yeahhhh…” forum post:

Currently on the aditi beta grid.

llSetLinkTexture(integer link_pos, string texture, integer face)
Sets the texture of face for link_pos

llSetLinkPrimitiveParams(integer linknumber, list rules)
Set primitive parameters for linknumber based on rules.

Yes! It’s about time! (By which I mean, “thank you for the continued steady fulfillment of the userbase’s most desired wishes, Linden Lab.”) These are two of the biggest “missing functions” in LSL. With their addition, scripters can update all prims in an object with one script instead of a hundred or more.

Now, let’s get to work updating this thing!

It’s true, the LSL Wiki has returned, now hosted at LSLwiki.com. This is the complete database as it existed on SecondLife.com as of the moment it was taken down. Your logins are all the same. There’s still a couple redirect problems I haven’t cleaned out yet, but it works. I’ll finish fixing that stuff tomorrow. In the meantime, happy LSLing.

Edit: There will be changes and upgrades to the wiki in the near future. Some of this may include porting the database to a more modern wiki engine. I’m certainly not making this decision alone, but I haven’t decided what I want to do yet.

Due to the recent security issues affecting Second Life, the LSL Wiki will no longer be hosted on the Second Life website I’ll post additional updates here next week when it relocates to its new home at LSLwiki.com.

In the meantime, a few users have a backup available here.

I’ve noted on several occassions that I only ever get to upgrade my computer when something very bad happens to it and I have to replace parts. This tends to happen once or twice a year, in my experience. As such, my desktop has now made the jump to PCI Express video — to my annoyance. While I can’t help but be impressed by the increased performance, I also can’t help but be annoyed that I was forced to do this at all.

Regardless, I am back for good this time. Really.

In my absence, it seems there’s been some long-awaited changes to the group tools, a topic I’m very eager to talk about shortly.

In LSL news, the changed() event has been fixed to handle cases in which a script is dropped on an object, as has llGetScriptName. Additional bugs have been discovered in changed() as well, lending further credence to my theory that it’s actually been an elaborate hoax on the part of Cory Linden all along. This time, it’s been the teleport and region-crossing detection functionality that’s broken. Scripters, make sure you put your essential scripts in root prims!

Mono project founder Miguel de Icaza writes about Linden Lab’s presentation at Lang.NET 2006 in which Cory and Babbage Linden described the upcoming move to the Mono CLI.

The challenge is to stop and save a running script. This is something that is relatively easy done with their scripting language, but it becomes trickier with the CLI.

Their implementation instruments the generated CIL assembly to allow any script to suspend itself and resume execution on demand. This is a bit like continuations, the main difference is that the script does not control when it is suspended, the runtime does. The instrumentation basically checks on every back-branch and on every call site whether the script should stop (in Jim’s words, “eventually, you run out of method, or you run out of stack”) and if it must stop, it jumps to the end of the method where a little stub has been injected that saves the state in a helper class and returns.

A very clever idea. Hopefully the slides for the presentation will be posted soon.

I’d very much like to have attended that presentation, and I’d be interested in seeing those slides as well.

Following my attorney’s advise I have obtained a Second Life account.

Welcome to Second Life, Miguel!

(Link stolen from Baba Sucks.)