Nicholaz Shows Mercy

Then why even bother to ship beta releases if the tool for getting feedback is broken ?

Look at Dazzle for another example: Since its First Look version, the feedback has been largely negative, very few people actually like the colors in Dazzle, and people have been screaming for some kind of theme browser or a simple way to revert to the classic color scheme in the preferences.

Yet the feedback has been superbly ignored and Dazzle has been promoted to Release Candidate status without any changes (except the introduction of more bugs than in the First Look Dazzle).

Am I the only one to think that LL's logic is completely flawed ?

I have no clue Nibb, but there was for while there everything fixed often seemed to leave more issues.
I have no clue what LL are thinking unless they share it on blog.
They have done some stuff right or we wouldn't be here spending money on L and land

Downloaded latest Nicholas client EC-d and crash every time I right-click on avatar and choose Friends. Anyone else getting this problem? I've sent a report to Nicholaz.

In other words, they need to hire someone who actually understands coding? Or doesn't mind just rewriting the whole farking viewer into one working unit?

I understand that this is a 'team effort' thing with each team doing a separate part, but in this case, management has been completely remiss in keeping the teams working towards the same goals. This alone would lead to conflicting coding within a system, due to a lack of communication.

Communication.. how it affects everything.

Just tried it out and encountered the same result. Also tried selecting groups. That does not crash the client.

I'll play around some more with it when I get home from RL work.

Now that's an unfair accusation. When a program gets complicated, it can be very difficult to see the subtle interrelations of different parts, and impossible for any single person to understand all of what's going on in exacting detail. It is quite common for programmers to write something that works without entirely understanding why; there's even a term for that situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kludge#Computer_science_use

This is not to say that Nicholaz's code is kludgey, only that it is unfair to suggest that LL's staff are incompetent programmers simply because they are unable to understand the details of an obscure patch.

This does of course return to Ann's point. If they are having difficulty understanding what Nicholaz's code is doing, the first step would be to talk with him about it.

Yes. However, frankly, it is unrealistic to expect a well-run engineering group to encourage individual programmers to talk directly with open source programmers. It could blow schedules in a big way.

This goes back to a point I made in Nicholaz's log, that LL could help itself out with valuable resident subcommunities (such as the open sourcers) by hiring a part-time liason from the subcommunity. In this case, that person would be responsible for facilitating a direct relationship between Nick (as a premier contributor) and selected developers. This is VERY common among companies with diverse customer bases (for example, medical instrument makers). I think LL is deterred from doing this by past hue-and-cry about favoritism (FIC, etc.). That LL allows such childish rants to deter them from keeping in contact with their customer base, even to the point of leaving valuable fixes on the floor, astounds me.In all tech companies I've been involved with, that person would be the head of development, who might be Joe Miller (http://lindenlab.com/about/management#miller). CTOs are not responsible for setting requirements, priorities and schedules; they are strategic thinkers who do long-term technology exploration, and act as outward-facing technical ambassadors. The relationship between Mr. Miller and the currently unfilled position of VP Technical Operations is a little unclear: https://home.eease.com/recruit2/?id=30064 .

I am willing to bet that at LL the programmers are also the alpha testers. This is a really really bad idea. At my company the first line testers are what you would call 'power users'. i.e. none of them have any IT background or skills but they know how to give the software a good workout.

Man, that's bad. What kind of connection do you have? I have yet to either be ported to -MAX_INT nor fly off the grid when crossing sims. Shoe butt, I have had plenty of; also the walking down slope through the ground thing, but that is usually snapped back in place in just a couple of seconds.

During perticularly bad days, ground vehicles can do some odd things when crossing sims and they get bad cutting across a corner. Flight is better but still risky at the corners.

FWIW, I'm on cable throttled back to 600K download. This is shared with 2 to 4 other computers on my home network at any given time. Granted this is not bad, but it if far from optimal. If I took all the failed, bugged or otherwise borked tp's into account there is no way I could get near to claiming 10% have gone bad much less half! Something is fubar for you, Nibb. I'm not sure what it could be.

Actually, you have used Nicholaz's fixes, as LL incorporates them in the regular viewers half a year later or so.

He has stopped memory leaks, crashes, made the viewer work better on lower end systems, stopped those viewer pauses, re-blurring of textures, made particles work better, repaired ass-tachments on TPing, allow an IM window that doesn't block half the screen, basically everything anyone complains about.

They used to, and still do apparently...

They didn't admit it, or list it in the fixes in the blog for 1.19.1, but apparently Nick's ass-tachment fix was found in the source code!

We've been enjoying that being fixed by Nick since last November or December, so it seems LL is right on schedule?

No, it's not fair. It's just the first thing that crossed my mind when reading the statement, given how the viewer DOESN'T function very well. That would explain so many of the repeat bugs in just the viewer alone, so I'm not the only one likely to leap to that conclusion. I'm just the one that said it, mostly to get it out there, so it can be debunked/argued/put out of mind.

I agree, I think most of LL's real problem boils down to communication (or the lack thereof) which could make a major difference in ANYTHING.

Very interesting. Thank you for responding to my question.
I just was wondering I keep meaning to one day check out his browsers but keep find myself distracted and forgetting to do so.
Then when I read here they don't know or LL doesn't know why they work it made me wonder since so many of you say really good things about his viewers.
I was just was wondering what makes his viewers so great to those who have used them, truly in respectful way and wondered why LL doesn't know why they work when they think it shouldn't if that is true.
I haven't yet installed beyond certain LL viewers, I really try to avoid adding new viewers unless I absolutely have to or a friend I trust strongly suggest it because previous viewer problems.
I do like the window going clear though I had no clue it was from one of his viewers,
I still personally getting blurry images and sometimes attachments that seem to have mind of their own with 1.19.4.

Now that is just a sad attitude.

But some bots are useful. Been somewhere recently that has an auto-join device for a group? That's done with a bot; there is no LSL capability to send a group invite, so it's done with a special-purpose client.

Some specialized clients are useful, too. Every try SLeek or AjaxLife? They're both ways of getting (limited) access to Second Life when you aren't on a 3D-capable computer, are behind a firewall, or (in the case of AjaxLife) can't even install an application.

Regression testing is a dev job? First I've heard about that. I'm a User Acceptance Tester (and a business user) and normally find regression testing to be down to me.

Agreed tho, signing off on a release is a risk/reward analysis.

I haven't had any perceivable problems with EC-d. The only thing is, and this began with the BE-v I was using prior, I get this strange DOS-type screen before I login and after I logoff.

What's with that??

That's a debug console, Czari. There is a pulldown menu called Consoles under, I think, Client (or Advanced menu, if the new Nick viewer has that instead). Make sure they're all off.

Doing this from memory so if I'm wrong about how to turn off the debug console, somebody correct me pls.
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Oh, thank you, Nika Seeing DOS boxes pop up give me flashbacks and I wonder what might happen next.

Will check that as soon as I go in world

He has released an even newer version, that plugs a memory leak.

Personally I find that use of bots obnoxious, almost as bad as greeter bots that hound you in the store, but y'know different strokes.

Newer than the one he had in experimental this AM?

The new one is EC-e, not sure when it became available but the one linked only from his blog post last night was EC-d.

Update: Tried the Console menu. None of the choices were checked. When I did try checking a few, I either got the info that was running in the separate DOS type box in a separate window on my SL screen, or it logged me out of SL.

I noticed in the new updates, Nicholaz has the viewer (ie. nicholaz-EC-e) plus a Source Code Folder (Source-EC-e). I read the info inside but am still a bit confused about the Source info. Am I supposed to copy that into the SL viewer file as well?

Thanks for any help once again.

Yes, EC-e is the latest from Nicholaz. And YES he's fixed the memory leak, the one Linden's couldn't find, couldn't be bothered to fix or whatever. I am now very very happy. All I want now is a Nicholaz version of the final 1.20 or whatever Linden viewer finally implements UI skinning. The I'll be free of Linden viewers hopefully for a long time or until they change things radically!

All you do with the Nicholaz version is download EC-e. You DON'T need the source code. Just drop the three xml documents and the exe file into your 1.19.1.4 folder, create a shortcut on Desktop from the Nicholaz exe and away u go. You can still use the installed Linden viewer as before.

Sorry, Czari (hey, does that rhyme?). To turn off the DOS window, in the client menu, uncheck "Console Window" near the bottom.

Hope that does it for ya!
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