Recent comments

You've been sorely missed.

I fear your zing has been harnessed for a steam-powered Aethernet device. See this article in the Guardian: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1817636,00.html

Madam, had I a means of locating and capturing your "zing" safely, I should be out even now scouring the countryside for its whereabouts. Sadly, all I can do is offer my prayers for its expedient return. That, and perhaps visit your tip jar to deposit a few more Linden-Farthings towards funding an expedition to track down the beast. :-)

Inspiring to see how much thought is going into your builds. Hope you find your zing!

Yes, it will do that... one could change the speed at which it alerts, or reduce the timer interval to detect only very sudden changes in position.

It is perhaps worth a try - being surrounded by an invisible box *with ban lines* might well confuse any such practitioners.

Hello Mme. Malaprop,

I was wondering if the SLURL web configurator could be altered to allow form variables to be passed in and have them defaulted on the form. Do you have that kind of power? I also put together a slurl device in my little MeraGadget, but I'd like to kick it off to the SLURL builder so I can configure the title, image, etc. :)

Thanks!

Redundancy and failsafes and not writing brittle, finicky scripts are of course important, and to be honest that is the trick with scripting in Second Life; it is not so much the language, which can be grasped quite quickly, but knowing all of the possible problems and being able to compensate for them.

The idea of evolving devices, though, does interest me, though I confess to having a background and a lifelong interest in such things as evolutionary algorithms. For instance, to take the example of the tram in Caledon: each tram could have a genome which determines such parameters as its speed, its movement timer and so on. The longer a particular genome survives, the more the rezzer favours it. When it does die, the rezzer picks out a new genome based on merging all of the most successful ones, plus a random mutation factor to keep things evolving. Such a system could keep going for years, no matter what changes are made to the underlying reality. And that is but a simple example.

If you elect me, I promise I won't lose terribly many of my minio^H^H^H^H^Helectorate in hyperspace!

Another odd bug.

The nasty bugs are the ones that unexpectedly change behaviour over the course of days, weeks, or months.

This brings up an interesting sort of natural selection that seems to be encroaching.

So - what of our creations? The brittle ones, the ones that cannot suffer the slings and arrows of serendipitous oddness, simply don't survive.

Those things that do survive, do so with survival mechanisms - the tram and monorail re-rezzings being a prime example. I checked the monorail page, and yes, there were some faults today, which have apparently been recovered by the re-rezzer.

We have no way of knowing what bugs are coming, but I think we *do* have a way of knowing what features will assist in survival.

Re-rezzing, or perhaps we should call it 'death and rebirth' - already defends against a vast class of bugs.

What more will come? I suspect variances in generations - if type X is failing, rez Y, or rez Z until one solution can carry forward. Inevitable.

Though I suspect the blitters, trams, ducks and slugs will have a bit more of our not-so-divine guidance, until said solutions have become commonplace over time.

These 200m ban lines won't change our cultural landscape much - just our technical one. Like the bugs, what they will do is force the evolution of scripted vehicles that allow us to penetrate them, and suppress the creation of physical vehicles of all types. Natural selection in action.