Searchation, mappery

A few quick notes:

• I am informed further regarding the collection and retention of data by the Searching Homunculus by Christian Westbrook-Prior of the Electric Sheep. It seems that, every time the bot enters a sim to do its work in rescanning the contents of that sim, all previously-gathered information is wiped, and the database is then re-populated only with those items which the bot has been told it may index.

  This seems to me to be commendable practice, in that no more information is gathered than is strictly necessary, and nothing is retained past the time it takes the Searching Homunculus to reach a particular sim again. The issue of the Retention of data is one which is often ignored when considering general issues of privacy, but it is one which has proven very significant at times - a recent case reported in Other World Newspapers comes to mind. It also helps reassure those who were wondering whether the Searching retained data on all items, and only displayed those for sale - it does not. (The practice also strikes me as considerably more efficient.)

• I am sorry to say that my SlurlBlogger does not appear to be operating properly with the “Blogger” journalling system at the moment. Google, the Company which now operates Blogger, has recently changed the Standards which it requires outsiders to operate under, and I suspect may have removed support for older protocols. Ah well. When I have the requisite time I shall take a look at this to see if I can fix it. The device continues to operate with Wordpress and others which still support the old Blogger API, mind you.

• On the subject of SLurls, readers may have noticed a certain absence of, well, the entire grid on them recently. Whilst SLurls still work in the sense of providing a little box with a caption and image and teleportation link and whatnot, they do not show anything beyond that.

  Do not be alarmed, this is known about - it appears that certain parts of the existing map system were causing excessive strain, and re-engineering is required. I personally shall continue using SLurls for the time being. For more information you might wish to consult Linden Lab’s Bug Tracking Thing; as well as this, the more technically-minded may be interested in SignpostMarv Martin’s SLOpenID project implementation of a Map API (also here).