When the days go shorter the party´s get bigger

Regions Updated

The quiet months are almost over. In summertime it´s always a little slower in the Metaverse, Less people attend the various party´s, and the general `online` population shrinks with about a third, as hanging at the beach in RL & having late barbecues has it´s charms as well.

Dan the Man

Looking back on this summer, loads of changes have been made in the grid´s back-end configuration, and this always brings glitches and tiny nuisances along. But at least there is progress. Due to careful monitoring of the grid by in particular Mr. Banner, potential catastrophic events have been prevented. This did result in the grid being `disabled` a couple of times, but this didn't spoil the fun. And again, for all you doomsday figures out there, the grid did not crash a single time. Monitoring indicated an issue, and the admin took preventive measures to ensure nothing exploded, and disabled assets,  inventory & logins to prevent any damage. Good job on that, as eventually after a long diagnostics run, a disk was replaced.

OSG9B was a success, despite the logins being disabled for some hours on the opening party. Hurray for the Hypergrid, as we still partied hard anyways. Various pictures and video's can be found on the OSG9B collection in my G+ Profile.  If you have more media to share, feel free to mail me a link, and i will add it to that page for historical reference.

Today all 20 Red Dragon Regions have been updated to the latest version released 7 august, and all are running as expected. Firestorm issued a new release of it's viewer, with some feature enhancements for VAR regions, audio and some other stuff. more info HERE.

You have 2 more weeks to visit the OSG9B regions, before they will be permanently archived and taken down. They are located around event plaza, and if you have not visited them yet, you're missing out. There is a lot of very nice free stuff available, and the builds there are definitely worth your time.

Every Saturday there is a Resident Meeting on Wright Plaza. If you have brilliant suggestions or questions on any OSG related subject, feel free too attend and share your thoughts / ask what you need to know. It's a good way to keep up to speed inworld, with all that's happening in the grid.

On a final note, a goodbye / Farewall to a friend, Mr Bill Windwalker, aka Xstorm Radek. Many years he visited Red Dragon in both SL and OSG, and being a mentor he helped out hundreds if not thousands of users inworld. He has left the metaverse, and I wish him all the best for the future. "You might not return, but will not be forgotten".  That's all for now.

NB: Possibly the URL of this Blog will change in the near future, as i plan to hook it to it's "own" domain name. You will be redirected when it happens. (first need to fix some certificate stuff for it).

Ups & downs & preparing to Party

Every year when summertime kicks in, party's & events start later and draw less people, logins slow down slightly, and less new people enter the grids. It's not that the Metaverse grinds to a halt though, as loads of activities are also available throughout summer.
One of the major events being OSgrids 9th birthday party.  Over 60 creators are building / have built displays on the OSG9B regions surrounding Event Plaza in OSgrid. Make sure to visit, stroll around and feast your eyes on the creative ingenuity of the people dwelling our world.  

Last week OSgrid had an outage, first the logins were disabled, and eventually the grid was taken offline. One of the asset servers was locked, and as a security precaution things were taken offline until the engineer that built the cluster could have a look & fix it. Nothing exploded. 

Now when the grid goes off, this is "uncommon" and always causes some strange panic. When the loginpage sais "Logins disabled" you can be sure maintenance of some form is happening, there patching, or investigating some issue. Typically this doesn't take extremely long.

When the loginpage sais the grid is down, you can (when due) expect a message at twitter in the sidebar on that same page, and a notification on http://news.osgrid.org which will also email you, if subscribed.
Mind this happens only after there is a "formal response", preferably with an ETA on a fix. This generally will happen between 8 and 24 hours, if it's expected to be down longer. Before that time, you can be sure all social media channels & the OSG forums already have something posted, as "bad" news tends to travel fast.

Well than how do they know ?  If you need to know about it every time the grid burps immediately, IRC is the place to be. Within minutes after the logins being disabled you can expect activity there. Possibly even hear a reason for the logins being disabled, or talk to people that know. For rest it's unfortunately the same, you act like all of us. You wait until the green "online" thingy appears back on the webby. Not much more you can do anyways, they don't shut it down for shits & gigglez.
Due to careful attention & monitoring, and acting in best interest of the grid and its residents potential catastrophic events are avoided which should be applauded. And since apparently finding info can be a challenge, if you like to keep up to speed on OSGrid and all things Metaverse related, try this : http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/osgrid  and you have most relevant stuff  & info available in a click.

Busy month

Well, it's been quite some weeks since i posted here, so let's see what happened in the OSgrid. There is a steady influx of new people, and apparently more activity on social media lately, which is great. You (would probably not be reading this if you didn't) already know about open sim, but 95% of the rest of the world never heard of it, or doesn't half understand how awesome it actually is. So more attention on FB, twitter, G+, youtube, Flickr, and other mediums is great. Like us here !

OSG9B preparations were started, and all plots were "gone in a week", indicating there is a lot of interest in the celebrations for OSgrids 9th Birthday. I took a sneak peek already, and it has awesome freebies & display builds, so be sure to check out the OSG9B  regions, there placed around Event Plaza. Progress & the event planning is discussed weekly at the Saturday Q&A on Wright plaza. (In case you do not care about meetings at all, there is also a party starting at 10.00 every Saturday on Mirrrorland, with DJ Aussie, and hosts Mirror & Linda !).

Last weekend all OSgrid code was updated to version 0.9 in the backend. This should improve daily use a lot. Better TP's, and no more crashing VAR regions if you place them against each other. (also meaning you now can easily make very large regions).  If you're running old code, this might be a good moment to bring your simulators up to speed.

New community classes have started, the current sessions are on "Scripting" and given by Fu Barr on Sandbox plaza. (These classes are "hands on" so you get to rez stuff and play around with actual scripts). They will reoccur weekly until finished. Every Saturday, Sandbox Plaza 12.00 PST (grid time). straight after the Saturday Q&A.  You only missed the basic class for now, so can still enter next week, attend, and get smarter. Chatlogs will be placed on the OSG Wiki.

The Friday event has seen a lot of new performers, DJ Jay-Lo, DJ Prinz, DJ Strannick, Joao, MadMax, Singergirl, Cecilia & Hafxex, and more. We even had the Phaandoriagrid flash-mobbing over to co-host the Friday party, which was a blast. It's awesome when you meet people from other grids, party together and have a great time.

We try to make en effort to offer you a varied scala of performers, so you get a diverse offering of music and live acts at the Friday party's. After OSG9B you can expect some "themed events" to occur, more on that later. Mind that if you're a performer or DJ, regardless of what grid you live in, you're more than welcome to participate in this event and come over to play/ sing/ run a set, with your crew. Great way to promote your venue, share your music / skills / lyrics,  and make new friends.

My fundraising project for OSG is not exploding, only 4 members sofar, but all bits help. (And these "sizable" bits help a lot). Many other initiatives have started, and all these efforts hopefully will result in a stable basis to bring the OSgrid in the next phase of it's life cycle.  OSG also made a quicklink on paypal, with which you can easily do paypal to paypal micro transfers. Find it on : https://www.paypal.me/OSgrid  Mind that for US residents, any donations to OSgrid are tax deductible.

HG safari had its 100th Trip, and celebrated it on Event Plaza. Great fun. If you like to explore & party, they leave from Francogrid every Wednesday to various destinations.
At Red Dragon not a single prim was rezzed past few weeks, it will be updated to latest code this weekend. Lastly i worked on a simple page with buttons linking to any "relevant" OSgrid & Metaverse related pages. Find it here :  http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/osgrid