SLURL: slurl.com/secondlife/Rouge/153/209/21

Yes, it lives again! I would like to point how extraordinary Alidar Moxie is, her skills for a complete catastrophe recovery totally leaves me in awe. Kudos sweetie, you really made it in such a short time despite all of the challenges. So now we can concentrate on Codali and expanding our activities as we see fit.

Read this for a description of the problems we experienced and how we solved them.

Anatomy of the Problem

As our loyal customers know, this website and all of MechanizedLife’s Main product lines went offline on November 14th 2008. This was due to several factors that seemed to happen in an order that was improbable and should never have happened.

Network Area Storage Failure

Part of my backup strategy was a home Network Area Storage (NAS) device that contained two mirrored hard drives and contained daily snapshots of both the MechanizedLife website ecosystem and databases. Sometime in late October, I noticed that this device was not only having trouble serving files back to me, but was having issues storing files, as well. While I thought I was covered, as I could place the drives into a computer and pull the files out, this did not prove to be possible due to a spreading corruption issue with the controllers themselves. This, of course, spread to the worst possible sections of the drives, the MechanizedLife backups, rendering them useless (along with several areas of dear personal data).

Internet Service Provider Wonkiness

My first internet service provider, a friend, supported MechanizedLife as best as he could and only asked that I move on when I overwhelmed his servers. When I moved to my new provider, I took their ‘unlimited’ plan hoping to never have to worry about bandwidth or storage issues as they touted unlimited amounts of each. They gladly accepted my money, 1 year in advance, and set up my account. The first time they told me that I had overwhelmed their server, I apologized and tried to optimize my databases further (keep in mind, please, that I am an Oracle Certified professional, have worked as a DBA full time, and currently have clients who contract specifically for my DBA skills). The second time they told me this I realized that they simply wanted a scapegoat, but asked if they had dedicated or virtual dedicated servers I could upgrade to, which they did not, and I started looking for upgrades. I complained and they did not say anything else to me for a long while.

Recently, it started happening again. My business grew, thanks to loyal customers like you, and they started complaining again. I was actively looking for a new provider when they permanently suspended my account and said ‘we will not give you any backups’, which in light of the above NAS problems was a problem. I offered to pay for them, they refused. I threatened to sue, they refused. They, of course, pointed to some obscure point in the terms of service that said they didn’t have to. Long story short, I wasn’t getting them no matter what I did (I even offered to let them keep the last of my year’s service agreement money in exchange).

The Outage

Since 95% or so of MechanizedLife products have an online component, I took them immediately offline and placed an order for a VPS, essentially a virtual dedicated server of my own that I can run as I see fit. This will allow me to do things like take daily snapshots of databases and run custom software and operations that my old provider would not allow. I am also on my own server, so I cannot effect anyone else’s service. Its more of a ‘you’re on your own’ environment, which suits me fine.

Codebastard Redgrave, Codie, immediately got a notice up on her blog and helped me to pick out the new service and has helped me tremendously in selecting service providers and options. I chose a company where my needs are the minimum they offer so that if I have to grow, which I hope I do, I can do so, and in this environment its as simple as rebooting the server.

Product Status

At the moment, all products (with the exception of the Del.ici.ous tagger which will be back online by the end of the week) are back online. StatsCollectors came online the middle of last week automatically as the domains became available. CalendarCogs are back online, but the database was destroyed meaning customers will need to go back onto the website and redo all of their settings. Unless they happened to be near the device when it reset they do not know their password and the easiest way to reset it will be to either contact Paypabak Writer or to purchase a free Password Resetter.

Going Forward

With the help of Codie, snapshots of the database and website will be downloaded not only to my home computer, but also to her location as well, ensuring this cannot happen again. The backup process for the database is in place already and the process for the websites will be in place later today. This move is actually good for MechanizedLife, as it gives me the confidence to introduce some products that I had been reluctant to release in my old hosting environment. It also coincides with work Codie and I have been collaborating on in regards to our joint venture called Codali that we already had press releases and logos made for when all this mess occurred.

Thank You

Thank you for sticking with me through all of this. I know that it is inconvenient and not at all fun. In order to say thank you, we are going to offer a promotion. Between December 1st and the end of the year, any MechanizedLife product you own that was effected by this outage, we’ll deliver one of the same item any to avatar on the main grid you choose. Simply send us a notecard with your name, the name of the product, and the name of the avatar to whom you wish to have the promotional item delivered. Notecards should be sent to Paypabak Writer and she will see that they are delivered as quickly as demand allows. Thank you again for your loyalty and patience. Stay tuned for more new and exciting tools to be released under the new Codali brand.

As some may know I am associating with Alidar Moxie from MechanizedLife.Com under a new banner called Codali.

This morning, Alidar’s hosting provider suspended her account without prior notice stating overusage, effectively kicking offline all of Alidar’s inworld products, namely the CalendarCog products, StatsCollector and a few other products that depends on a central external server to store data and operate.

No offer to upgrade the account from them, this says a lot about their scaling capacity. Alidar’s business was not welcome anymore at this provider, one of the many practicing overselling of their servers apparently. Beware of any ISP stating unlimited use and read the fine print, they will drop you like a rock if your business grows too fast.

We were actually already in the process of moving MechanizedLife.Com to another provider, but the sudden account suspension just precipitates the move. This will also cause a general 48h-72h outage because of the mandatory DNS change, due to complete lack of collaboration of the current provider.

The services will be restored ASAP as we move all of the data on a dedicated VPS on another provider and do the appropriate DNS changes. The new platform will be much more powerful and allow the business to grow without interferences.

Thanks in advance for your patience while we restore access to the services.

CONTEST CLOSED! It took about 20 minutes to giveaway the 10 FilterCams. Thank you to all the winners and hope you enjoy your FilterCam!

To introduce my new FilterCam product to the public, I am pleased to offer 10 full version upgradable copies of FilterCam 1.02 to the FIRST 10 PEOPLE to send me a notecard inworld. I will account the 10 first by my email logs.

The notecard must be entitled “FilterCam Giveaway” and must contain a short paragraph on what use you will have for it. Ex. Shoot my next machinima, take artistic nude pictures, make a comic book, etc… Send that notecard to CodeBastard Redgrave inworld and I will send the 10 FilterCam units tonight to the lucky winners.

As a winner you are bound to nothing, it’s a gift. Of course, I would totally appreciate to see your creations in the FilterCam Flickr group. The giveaway version is the same as the main version, so you will be able to have all the upgrades and support.

FilterCam is detailed at 1000L so this is a 10K total giveaway.

First come first served!

Reposted from: http://blog.koinup.com/2008/10/become-koinup-pathfinder.html

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Become a Koinup Pathfinder

Do you think that all Second Life Places have been already discovered? Is that so? Not at all! Tons of amazing places are waiting for someone who will bring them to light and because of that we are bringing to you the Koinup Pathfinder Competition

The Koinup Pathfinder competition is a weekly contest hosted on Koinup. Each week we will select a theme and we will ask Koinup members to discover new sims related to this theme and post them on Koinup!

The two participants which will discover the most sims will be the natural winners of the weekly contest and they will get some amazing prizes!

Some features metaverse developers will sponsor the initiative, by supplying their creations as prizes of the event!

Codebastard Redgrave is the first featured developer entering the program. She will raffle her new FilterCam!

Some basic rules for taking part in the event:
1) We consider eligible for the count only sims not yet published on Koinup!
So check it out if some sims are already available on the Koinup Second Life Places section
2) In order to post sims, it is enought that, when you are in those sims, you send a postcard (here how to send a sl postcard on Koinup)
or that you upload a photo related to those places and later add the slurl

3) At the end of each week we will count the sims and verify which are the most prolific explorers

First week competition! Halloween theme!
The first round of the Koinup Pathfinder is devoted to Halloween. TP in SL, search for Halloween (or scary or vampire-moody or bloody) sims and post them on Koinup. The competition will start today 10/29/08 and will end 11/05/08

The two winners will be announced 11/05/08 and they will be contacted for the release of prizes- They will get the FilterCam supplied by Codebastard Redgrave

Each week we will made two blog-entries. The first one dedicated to launch of a new theme contest and the other for announcing the winners.
If you wanna stay updated with all the blog entries related to the Koinup Pathfinder competition, please follow this link

Have you some suggestions for the next themes?

I would like to share the saddest IM I think I have ever recieved.

[20:18] Lillie Yifu: good bye

I think it is useless for me to mention how outraged most of the SecondLife community is at the moment, regarding Linden Lab’s latest decision to give us an in-your-face price hike on OpenSpace sims with no grandfathering clause. Neither on what exact incentives are behind this decision but pure greed and profits.

You may know I’m not the kind to call on a lynch mob. I like to try and be rational, analyze the facts coldly, and try to be reasonable. But yes, I am pissed. Because of the resident side of the things. Linden Labs still misses one major main point about their own community of supporters. We are citizens. We are investors. We are customers. We LIVE in there. We love our Second life.

But now, this latest decision seems to be totally crossing the line for many residents and can easily be described as nearly fraudulent, especially regarding the non-grandfathering clause. It will have major impacts on how each of us residents, content creators, and business people will see Linden Labs from now on, as a company that cannot keep it’s word.

And this, my friends, is a bad thing.

I certainly see how it will impact strongly on the educational, business, creative, social and artistic aspects we happened to reach nowadays, thanks to OS sims. They saved us from ugly, ad filled mainland. Allowed small private ownership of a large nice piece of land with coastlines, so we could place our little house and enjoy our lives.

And one of the biggest spit in our faces is the calling on abuse of technical resources. What of a company that oversells it’s resources like doubling prims on OS sims and then complain of overuse because of their own decisions, penalizing the whole community of people that uses those sims correctly? How is it the resident’s problem if LL cannot QoS or regulate sim usage or network/asset resources? How unreliable asset servers were BEFORE Linden Labs sold massive amounts of OS sims? Those are all questions we should ask them.

OS sims are 16 per quad core machine. They bring 4 times more income to LL (i stand corrected, they make about the same amount). Apart sucking more assets from the asset servers, the only impact an overcrowded OS sim has is to press on it’s virtual neighbours. Nothing LL ever bothered with for mainland. So why the sudden interest?

So, no. Little stores with 2 visitors an hour, like Nimil Blackflag/Lucas Gerard’s LuNi and Autumn Hykova’s Pixel Dust are NOT something I would consider abusive considering their tiers. Not much more than having 16 little stores on a crowded mainland sim. This is all pure bullshit IMOHO and it is an attempt to divide our communities by starting a blame game. Divide and conquer, but we won’t be fooled.

We all know the underlying reason for that is simple.

Maximize profits.

Complain on service abuse on a massive scale and hit your customers with a non-grandfathering clause on a borderline affordable monthly tiers, so lots of people drop their OS sims and they get recycled in new products like mainland or their Nautilus thing.

We don’t really need to dig deeper on the problem to find a solution.

Lindens must know we are citizens.

We create here, we foster here, we provide their content, that makes this place enjoyable.

Putting our tiers on jeopardy, since it’s a steep tiers raise, will affect many talented and emerging content makers, scenic creators, photography artists, sailing and resident communities from everywhere. The raise alone is one thing, but it’s the non-grandfathering clause that will hurt all of the actual owners, pushing them to abandon their land to be recycled.

Attacking our spaces is attacking our content. We are now all stuck to move it, merge it into Class 5 sims, lose hours of work relocating and redoing everything. This is just a big lack of respect for their best and most faithful customer base.

It is a blind business decision, not a very strategically intelligent one. Without all the quality and innovative content created by it’s very involved resident base, SL would be a very unattractive place both for residents and for businesses.

Linden Labs has made many bad moves, but attacking it’s most faithful user base may be the last straw.

We already saw a few very alarmed people, selling and quitting, and our economy is not only undermined but sabotaged deliberately, in such times, I would say it is more than time for public outcry.

You already know what to do. Do it. It’s not true the Lindens don’t listen. They must keep enough of us happy to keep their business viable. Vote the MISC-1776 JIRA issue. Write in the Linden Forums how it affects you and your friends businesses and lives. Make some noise. Pass the word.

We must remain the positive and resourceful community we are. Suggest. Protest. Be inventive. Remember Linden employees just follows their management. But they must hear us all at united saying: fuck NO.

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I won’t do a resource list here, but check on VintFalken.Com she does good recap work.

I need to post positive before going on a rambling about the OpenSpace issue, so I thought I would share something pretty and fun to calm down. Lately I was hanging with Gabby at our new (soon to be closed) little asian inspired retreat we just built, and I fiddled a few fun Windlight settings and I thought I would share them with you lovelies.

Those are instructions for SecondLife viewer on Vista. Location may differ on Macs, Linux and WinXP

1. Download Rouge_Windlight.zip
2. Unzip this ZIP archive directly in:
   C:\Program Files (x86)\SecondLife\app_settings\windlight\skies
3. Restart SecondLife

Of course I won’t explain how to select them from the Windlight menus, this is pretty standard stuff.

I recommend setting your water to red, black or even white for super cool reflection effects!

Here are a few samples:

Rouge 1

Rouge 2

Rouge 3

Rouge 4

Rouge 5

Rouge 6

For Immediate Release

ROUGE - CodeBastard Redgrave announces the release of her latest development, the FilterCam HUD.  This device, created for all Second Life photographers and machinimists, both amateur and professional, eliminates the need for post processing by allowing the user to create artistic and dynamic SL(tm) photographs through a simple to use, menu-driven HUD.

The FilterCam HUD menu features 30 preset filters, including 13 texture masks created in collaboration with noted Second Life photographer and artist, Ryker Beck.  Users can also create their own, custom filter and texture effects, making the FilterCam fully customizable.

Current filter and texture masks include: blood, cinema, circle, clear, grunge, iphone, nightvision, oval, postcard, scanlines, square, tryptic, and wanted.

According to Redgrave, “Its the first customizable effect processor for SL ™ as far as i know.”

This, the first official release of the FilterCam HUD, has been thoroughly alpha tested and is now available for purchase only at the Rouge Boutique.  FilterCam users are also invited to join the Flickr FilterCam Group  - http://www.flickr.com/groups/filtercam/ - and post their own photographs using the FilterCam HUD.

Upgrades to the FilterCam HUD system are free and automated, and new textures and presets are in the design stages and will be added in the future.

Redgrave also notes, “I would like to thank Ryker Beck for making all of those fantastic filter masks, you, girl, seriously kick ass.  Thanks to Alidar Moxie for being so brilliant and insightful. Thanks to Gabby Panacek for helping with promotion and documentation and distracting me from scripting.  Thanks to all alpha testers and to everyone that contributed with ideas especially the SL Plurkies.”

Credits:

LSL Scripting by CodeBastard Redgrave

Filter Masks by Ryker Beck

Redgrave is the creator of the infamous Boudoir Rouge portrait series, developer of the MachinimaCam and Dramavatar fashion line, and owner of the acclaimed Rouge Sim and the Code Red Lounge and Gallery.

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Get FilterCam here: Rouge Boutique

FilterCam Flickr Group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/filtercam/

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FilterCam Samples:

For real! Thanks to Alexx Markova, our genius posemaker, I have the great joy to release the first 5 Boudoir Rouge posesets, on presale right now! All fresh from today, custom tailored for boudoir photography work, those couple poses are ideal for any still photography.

Come and PICK THEM UP HERE

Just IM me for a special price if you take all 5 poseball sets.