Resident Transmission
OSGrid – the way-back machine
Now that OSGrid is back up I copied my OSG inventory out to an IAR, and it was like a way-back machine.
It turned out the office building right off the landing pier in andwest – which I thought was from 2011 was originally uploaded by me to OSGrid on December 29, 2008. It must have been built in SL a couple months before in the Concinna sim, and uploaded with Second Inventory.
Some other gems too like this Geek Desk Set also from 2008. It has 5 1/4" floppy disks…
There was also a super simple AO that had two animations; arms shackled back as the stand animation and a very butch male walk. The walk happens to be the walk of the default male avatar for the Kitely grid.
The 29 regions that existed on OSGrid are now removed from it as they were the basis for the xmir regions – regions that have been improved and changed over the almost half year time OSGrid was down. Hypergrid teleport is of course possible between xmir and OSGrid. Welcome back to OSGrid, and xmir welcomes any OSGridders to visit once the digital dust settles over there.
Hints of spring on the grid
While winter still lingers in many parts of the grid, a wave of warm winds from the south melted the snow in the low lands and brought a hint of spring to the air.
The new store in andwest finally got a name; LOT 247, and the storekeeper has stocked up with some good models of fitted mesh jeans. Come get them while they last!
xmir can be searched
In a world of internet search engines letting us dig down to the depths of information hidden in web pages across the planet, it might come as a shock how underdeveloped and lacking searching both OpenSim grids, SecondLife and Hypergrid itself is.
Search is technically complicated and for OpenSim and Hypergrid even more so where there often are not meaningful entities that can be indexed for search on a grid – you don’t want to end up with a massive catalog of locations with the telling name Prim for instance.
Opensim Search is the recommended search mechanism in combination with the built-in search functionality in OpenSim 0.8.x
Supposedly it should work right out of the box, but it didn’t - or maybe it actually did but the documentation is not quite up to the realities of how it worked. So it was left on the backburner…
Then suddenly, seemingly out of the blue it generated a datasnapshot which is the mother of all indexing for the search functionality. Simulator had been up running for days, nothing changed, then one snapshot and a few hours later another one. Based on the configured settings it was to do this every half hour – which it didn't.
It turned out that someone had tried to fetch the search data for inclusion in another search engine that was configured to use the datasnapshots, and by doing so it triggered the generation of it, which it then fetched and imported into the search database. – Which was not what the TFM described how it works.
So I ran the same fetch for xmir’s search setup, and lo and behold, there was searchable content on the grid!
Not all content is there or even works yet (groups), and if you visit with a viewer based on Linden Labs’ version 2 or 3 of their viewer, the search result is even less compelling, but at least you will get (some) search results. Welcome searching xmir!