Hurricane Sally Set to Hit Gulf Coast Tonight

Residents whom live on the US Gulf Coast between the vicinity of New Orleans and Pensacola Florida are facing a Hurricane Warning as Hurricane Sally closes in. The storm has become a Category Two hurricane with winds about 90 miles an hour near the eye.

The storm has been slowing down as it approaches the coast, which is allowing it to become stronger. By the time it reaches the coast late tonight or very early tomorrow morning, it is expected to have winds of 105 miles an hour near the eye. Flooding is expected as far inland as Birmingham Alabama with tropical storm force winds about as far. Residents in the path of severe weather may be without power, and Internet, for a few days, possibly several.

Source: weather.com 

Bixyl Shuftan

Update on the "Teleport Disconnects"

Earlier this month, Linden Lab came out and admitted what the residents had more or less figured out, Second Life was much buggier than usual, especially when it came to teleporting from sim to sim or crossing sim borders. So has there been improvement since then? Maybe some. Checking "Modem World," Inara Pey stated "There have been mixed reports on the outcome of the deployment made on Thursday, April 18th, 2019, with some indicating matters have improved, others reporting no real change. In particular, people visiting Fantasy Faire and travelling around the new Linden Homes continent appear to be faring a lot better than had been the case."

Simon Linden was quoted as saying at the Simulator User Group, " for server news, many of us are focused on the teleport issues … I hate to promise anything, but we all know a lot more about TP internal problems than we used to (smile) . We do understand they’re annoying and a frustrating problem – we definitely want to fix it and make it better."

Earlier, some residents wondered if the Lab moving data to Cloud servers was the cause of the glitches. Lately, there's been a new suspect, the EEP or Environmental Enhancement Project. Simon did admit that the problems appearing just after the release of EEP was "suspicious" and they were "trying to sort out is if somehow the environmental work caused the TP problems." He didn't think the glitches were related to avatar complecity, though stated "that said, the more complex your AV is, the more work it needs to change regions. It’s always been better to have fewer scripts and data for teleports and region crossings."

On a personal note, I myself seem to be having fewer problems with teleport disconnects, though there are still other glitches such as the viewer freezing for a bit. Some friends of mine are still crashing when teleporting around, so it seems the problem is still around.

Source: Modem World, SL Wiki

Bixyl Shuftan

"Darn Teleport Disconnects," Lab Admits Grid Trouble

If you're been having trouble teleporting across Second Life lately, you're not alone. Lately, a number of people in group chats I've listened in on, as well as friends and associates in private messages, have been complaining about various glitches on the grid. Besides the lag, probably the most frequent complaint I've heard has been crashing while trying to teleport from one spot to another.

Well, it seems things have gotten to the point that the Lab has to acknowledge there's a problem. In the "Tools and Technology" part of the official Second Life blog on Monday April 9, they posted that they're aware of the problem.

Many Residents have noted that in the last few weeks we have had an increase in disconnects during a teleport. These occur when an avatar attempts to teleport to a new Region (or cross a Region boundary, which is handled similarly internally) and the teleport or Region crossing takes longer than usual.  Instead of arriving at the expected destination, the viewer disconnects ...

The Lab believes that the cause is "a timing-sensitive failure in the hand-off" between sims when a teleport takes place, and there doesn't seem to be a way to eliminate the chance of a crash. They have people trying to get to the root of the problem and get rid of it. "Quite unfortunately, this problem dodged our usual monitors of the behavior of simulators in the Release Channels, and as a result we're also enhancing those monitors to prevent similar problems getting past us in the future. We're sorry about this - we empathize with how disruptive it has been."

A few residents I've talked to wonder if Linden Lab's moving information of it's data centers to cloud servers has something to do with recent bugs. When Patch and Grumpity Linden spoke at the VWBPE last Thursday, Grumpity stated the Lab was "very carefully moving things and not disturbing the way things are set up." So if one takes the Lab's word for it, the problem isn't The Cloud.

In the meantime, it looks like residents will be dealing with the possibility of their teleports ending up as viewer crashes, and having to restart the viewers and slowly log back in.

Bixyl Shuftan