ChazBob helps out

Apparently the number of active users in SL has reached a plateau at over 500,000. I have always wondered how the statistics were affected by the existence of alts, i.e. secondary avatars. While I have previously shied away from this practice, I have recently decided to create an alt, viz ChazBob Darwin. My initial objective was to have a no-frills account with which to trial the low-intensity SL clients AjaxLife and MovableLife (more on these in a later post). With the advent of the workshop and implied dissemination of materials, an alt has become a necessity so I can check permissions on objects I want to share. It was only using ChazBob that I was able to find, for example, that dissemination of structures via the Displayer was borked as the permissions on components of molecules , i.e. atoms, bonds and their component scripts, had been set incorrectly. This problem has a tendency to percolate up through the structure and make everything "single rez", i.e. you can only rez it once. At least running a workshop has surfaced this as an issue for me; it's certainly something I need to research further. Thanks to ChazBob I am at least a little better prepared for the workshop but other aspects have taken a back seat as a consequence.

Will ChazBob develop as a character? I've always thought Darwin a bit of a grump, albeit with some reason on his part. It would be nice to give him a second chance with a more cheerful persona.

Having played a little more with Builder's Buddy for packaging molecules, it does not seem to support the Rez-Faux practice of being able to link, modify and then take a sub-group of atoms/bonds so that you can clearly see what is left. This is slightly awkward when working with large molecules and it may be that we focus on small ones during the workshop.

On a more positive note, I am a great fan of dabbleDb and am using it in the first instance to implement the Structures in Second Life (SiSL) database. The embed code seems to play nicely with wikispaces and you can see rough draft examples of the output on the Open SLedware and Second Life Molecules wikis. The database design is very much in its infancy but it's a reasonable start. It should also allow us to generate an RSS feed so folk are notified as new molecules become available. There is, indeed, the option for notification of addition of certain types of molecule, something that the wikis wouldn't support though they, I suspect, are more accessible to search engines (I need to check whether that would include SiSL output). But this is for the (near) future.