No excuses, simply facts:
The holidays and the month of January were busy times for me, probably for everyone. I’d hoped that we could have gotten this process out the door much faster. For those of you that care, I have a new love in my life, moved to a new place, new work in RL, among many other very large changes that take time and effort to resolve and get settled in. It is unavoidable that some times will be hectic.
While I do not excuse the impatience and lack of understanding represented by a vocal minority who seem to feel that this is an opportunity to criticize my capacity, talk behind my back, disturb me during breakfast with ’is it done yet’, accuse me of being a scam artist, or to seek out people who may wish to represent a negative view of me, I *do* apologize to those of you who have been waiting patiently and offering support where needed. Those of you who are clearly on missions to bother me, dispute this process, or otherwise waste time have already heard my thoughts and will soon enough cease to be of any importance.
That said, the process of managing a software project is one that I always believe you should put a great deal of thought into before releasing something to the public to use. Gather requirements, understand the needs, develop the product, test it thoroughly, ensure proper equipment and plan maintenance, have redundancy and backups, and make some pretty graphics and a help file so people can use it.
Users of Second Life can identify with this: the stress of attempting to log in and it’s unavailable, the loss of inventory items, tons of other different kinds of pain and suffering that emerge from a service that was imho pounded out and pushed out the door with what I perceive to be the ’success at all costs’ mentality. I do enjoy SL, and I am happy to have it in spite of it’s flaws, but there is much to be said for planning a process and giving thought and consideration to the people it will affect. If you’ve ever felt anxiety at trying to use SL, you’ll know what I mean. It can be a wonderful world, or it can be an enfuriating and nerve-wracking nightmare.
Now, I’ve pontificated enough, I am going to bullet point what we have accomplished thus far:
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introduced the concept to the public and gathered information on their thoughts with reference to the project
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this weblog as a source of information now contains diagrams of the operation of the project as well as code snippets which DO work for land search (and will soon be demonstrated)
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code for a previous project (which DID work and was a complete landbot) was cleaned up and handed over to Land Shepherd for evaluation
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a great deal of research has been done and the key advantages held by other landbot operators have been identified and are gradually being converted into assets for this process
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we now have not one, not two, but FOUR servers available to run the project. two located in California, two located in Texas, both locations grant us the opportunity to have redundancy and backup in our process as well as rapid access to Linden Lab simulators. Some of these are supplied by businesses which are being compensated for the server, others supplied by a couple of friends who are interested in seeing this process succeed
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key elements of the tasks remaining are now documented
That’s a very brief encapsulation what has been done so far on this process.
The short term future is as follows:
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more information on the task list which will enable delegation of certain tasks and hopefully provision more rapid completion
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initially our objective was to POSSIBLY open source the entire project. (some code was made public on this site previously). A number of key concerns on the impact of making an application of this sort publicly available were expressed. We need to communicate on this and conclusively determine what we would like to do and properly consider the best interest of the public, Second Life, and this project. It’s not entirely clear to me who gets a say on this.
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Issues of information to provide, how finances and expenses on the continued process will be dealt with, who gets to know and decide what need to be determined
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breaking in the server and setting up test harnesses for the application is the first step on running an ongoing process
Ok. That’s a lot of typing, but hopefully everyone is up to speed on what’s been done, what’s being done, what’s planned, and we can begin to move forward and get this show on the road.
Immediately, I plan to communicate with Land Shepherd as soon as we can coordinate and will have more for you here as the opportunity presents itself.
