With all of the hype leading up to the ipad release culminating in Valleywag's bounty offer, it was hard not to follow suit and anticipate how awesome a touch screen tablet from apple would be.   I know that I was anticipating it's release.    The marketing succeeded.   It had my attention.   After a few weeks of hearing about it, I thought to myself, "if it is an Apple Mac Computer with OSX on it, I'll definitely be in the market".

After reading the articles and news reports about what an IPad is, however, I don't think it's for me.   Sure, it's nice looking..   ultra portable, has a vibrant screen, and responds to touch..  like an iTouch.  Unfortunately..   it's /too/ much like an iTouch.  In fact, it's simply a larger, faster iTouch.     Take an iTouch, stretch it out..    and you have an iPad.   I know iTouch and iPhones are all the craze now..   but I refuse to get one for various reasons.   Here's 3 of them.

1. Apple wants to say what I can and can't run on the iPad. 

Ahh, the app store.   The App Store is one of the biggest examples of a single content clearing house.  There are a number of benefits to this approach for Apple and relatively few for consumers and developers.  Apple can say what you can run on a device that you purchase.   If you install something un-approved, you void your warranty.   For consumers, this means that there's a single place to go to get content on their iphone.  It's searchable, sufficient for general use, and virus free.    The problem isn't that the App Store exists.  The problem is that it's the /only/ way to do things.    There's no way to download your app and run it(except javascript browser apps) .   One argument that could be made..   is that it reduces piracy for apps.  Piracy is a huge problem with PC/Mac applications so that /seems/ to make sense..     until you search the term 'Iphone App Piracy' on google.    Headlines like: Apple App Store Has Lost $450 Million to Piracy, and  New Iphone App Piracy Statistics reveal try before you buy myth  .    The articles show that, in this case, a single content clearing house is failing to prevent piracy.  Sure, it could be argued that, if the iPhone wasn't jailbroken, then all app piracy would be stopped.   However..    if the iPhone was not locked to the App Store, developers would have a better ability to secure their applications from piracy.    Crackers can always 'break' their DRM schemes..   so, what would at least slow the crackers down is diversity of techniques.    Crackers can currently..   simply pull the app from their jailbroken iphone with a 'certain app cracker' and put it on an app aggregation service.   The simplicity of this makes cracked app publication easy for an average user.

One comment on a forum:
I keep getting an error when trying to crack any application.
The error starts with:
"/var/stash/Applications.SZDqB9/----------/De---ptApp.sh: line 166: 75 Done od -A n -N 4096 -t......"
Please help. Cheers

The comment demonstrates that an average user is running the cracker app and asking for support on a forum.

One app publisher's piracy story:  Tap-Fu
"As another side note, the wait time for Tap-Fu to show up on the various sites from the time of release was about 40 minutes."

This demonstrates that the piracy argument is pretty lame.  

Next, what happens if Apple decides to close down the App Store?   I purchased an IPod Nano when it came out several years ago.   Not a whole lot of work has gone into ipod games :).  They actually used to exist.   What happens when the next big thing is something different?   How bloated is Itunes going to get? 

2. iPhone apps for a tablet based personal computer are not as useful as personal computer applications.

This one is pretty much a given.   Applications have been around on the personal computer for decades.   Companies have poured millions of dollars into applications to make them useful.    We're starting all over again for the iphone and iPad.  This may be good for apple and competitors of the market leaders in the industry, but this isn't necessarily good for users of the apps.  Pretty much, for a word processor, you have iWork(coming soon), Quickoffice, DocumentsToGo and gOffice.  As far as I know, the open source alternative, OpenOffice will not be available on the iPhone

3. It's hard to get user and document files onto and off of your iPhone/iPad

Most blog posters mention that one of the only 'official' ways to get user files, like word documents onto your iphone is to put it on your Apple iDisk.   Yay, more $$$ for Apple.

In Conclusion, iPad is not a Personal Computer.   I was really, really, really hoping that it would be one.   For the person who has everything, another 'gameboy' would be great.     The iPad is a bit more like a cross between a digital assistant/business assistant and game console then a personal computer.   The marketing for the device was effective in getting me interested that it was going to be released...   but the actual device itself doesn't suit me well.    For more info on the iPad, please visit Apple's iPad website.

I was watching the news and blogosphere lately and it seems that some people have the opinion that OpenSimulator /could/ have done something interesting but didn't move fast enough to capitalize on the first mover advantage...       Additionally, I've had people tell me personally that there hasn't been much news lately on OpenSimulator..   so it must be loosing steam.

The problem with these statements..   is they're entirely false.   There's been a TON of new press about OpenSimulator during 2008, 2009 and several important press items in 2010 already.   So, why the disconnect between perception and reality?   

One potential candidate for the disconnect..    is the OpenSimulator site itself.        Many people probably looked at the site, clicked the News link and seen that it hadn't been updated since September of 2008!   I have a google alert set up for news and blog items about OpenSimulator and I literally get 3 to 10 new blog posts or articles a day.   People are writing about OpenSimulator.   People are using OpenSimulator..     maybe it's time to update the news page.

So, I've updated the news page with a quick selection of news and press items.     A few items from 2009 that stuck out in my head as most important

The problem, of course, is we're all developers, engineers, scientists.   We're not PR people.  

This means that our effort is split like this:

• 97% - Code
• 3% - PR and Community Management

It also means that we probably let many opportunities to promote OpenSimulator pass us by.   In the past, I don't remember there being this disconnect of perception vs reality.   Then again, sdague was consistently updating the various news, public relations pages, and the community.   He used various techniques to communicate with the community.

• IRC
• Mailing Lists
• News and Information pages on OpenSimulator.org
• The Planet.us blog entry RSS feed aggregator 

I guess, if I looked at the News page alone, I might make the same conclusion as the people who are telling me that nothing new is coming out of OpenSimulator.

Another way that we can improve this perception is engaging the community.   The more they're engaged, the more they tend to be interested and promote OpenSimulator through word of mouth.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of reports of being unable to log into various websites.   

Most people, however, don't have an issue.     Just a few.  

So, I set out to locate the common element here.    

It turns out that some browsers occasionally get errors in the index of cookies that cause them not to expire from the cookie folder but, when the browser reads the cookie from the cookie store, it immediately expires them and doesn't send them back to the server.    Unfortunately, it also doesn't get rid of the cookie in the cookie store!   This 'state' of cookie doesn't allow the browser to accept a new cookie from the server.   This presents itself to users in the inability to log-in to a website or a website's inability to remember the user if they've checked 'remember me'.

You might think that simply clearing cookies would solve the issue.    In some cases, it does.     In some cases, it doesn't.    

When clearing cookies fails to resolve the problem, there's a workaround for Internet Explorer, the user needs to open an Explorer window to the user profile directory on their computer.   Commonly (on windows XP) , this is C:\Documents And Settings\YourUsername.    From there, go to the 'Cookies' folder/Directory.     Delete all of the items in there except Desktop.ini and Index.dat.  

There's also a workaround for FireFox:
Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Offline Storage (Cache): "Clear Now"
Tools > Options > Privacy > Cookies: "Show Cookies"

It's also possible that the file cookies.sqlite that stores the cookies is corrupted.
You can try to rename or delete cookies.sqlite and cookies.txt in your Profile Folder.

See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox for more information about how to find the profile folder on your computer 

Two days ago, I got a call from the customer service of one client that they were getting an ASP .NET error page (with the custom error page) when they were trying to use the account administrative service to manage user account data through a secure ASP.NET application.     With ASP .NET on a windows box, the actual error message will appear in the Event Log in the Application section so I took a look there.

The error message was an InvalidOperationException when using a System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection Open method.      The issue was that it wasn't able to get a pooled connection from the .NET SQL pool.    When recycling the application pool for this application in the IIS manager, the page would load up to the point when it required SQL Connections and then would wait.   I waited for a minute or two and it continued to try to load.   Upon refreshing the page, the ASP .NET error page appeared again.     It was clear that the server was unable make a connection with the database and that the connection pool was being exausted.    This wasn't immediately picked up by the application monitoring systems because they're on the public side of the server cluster.    

What struck me as odd was that the application is designed to handle those kinds of InvalidOperationExceptions gracefully by creating a new connection.   The idea here, is that; while, it's important to make sure that all database resources are managed and properly closed and disposed, it would be impossible to crash the application by exausting the sql connection pool.

The default in this application is to use a pooled connection but if the pooled connections are unavailable and .NET throws an InvalidOperationException on SqlConnection.Open, modify the connection string to inform .NET to create a new unpooled connection.

        private SqlConnection GetSQLConnection(Database db, bool pooled)
        {
            SqlConnection dbconn = null;

            lock (openConnections)
            {
                if (openConnections.ContainsKey(db))
                {
                    dbconn = openConnections[db];
                }
                else
                {
                    string connectionstring = ConnectionStrings[(int)db];
                   
                    if (pooled)
                        connectionstring += ";Min Pool Size=5;Max Pool Size=60;Connect Timeout=2;Connection Timeout=45";
                    else
                        connectionstring += ";Pooling=false;Connect Timeout=45;Connection Timeout=45";
                    dbconn = new SqlConnection(ConnectionStrings[(int)db]);
                    openConnections.Add(db, dbconn);
                }
            }
            return dbconn;
        }

The important bit about that code is:

• If the connection is pooled, append the pool size and pool timeout settings to the connection string.
• If the connection is not to be pooled, make sure to tell the .NET library to skip the pool.

Then, the connection is opened inside a Try/Catch for InvalidOperationException.   If an error is thrown by the try/catch, it gets a non-pooled connection.

                    try
                    {
                        conn.Open();
                    }
                    catch (InvalidOperationException)
                    {
                        // Try to start a non pooled database connection.
                        conn = GetSQLConnection(db, false);
                        if (conn.State == ConnectionState.Closed)
                        {
                            conn.Open();
                        }
                    }

When everyone is doing their job, this extra protection is not needed and rarely, if ever, executes.   40 database connections simultaniously open is Slashdot Effect territory.   It doesn't happen often.

This bit of code was acting exactly as designed.  It just so happens however, that a Microsoft Update got applied a few hours earlier and the server was waiting for the next planned outage window to reboot.  After rebooting the server, the server was once again able to resume normal operations.

Shortly after, I started getting complaints that a separate application wasn't allowing users to log-in.      After debugging for a bit, it turned out that the state was no longer being kept in the cluster for users.  This issue was on a different server in the cluster.   When a user 'switched' which 'behind the scenes' server in the cluster, the server didn't know what the user did last and therefore reported to the application that the user wasn't logged in.   It just so happened that a Microsoft Update got applied several hours earlier and the server was waiting for the next planned outage window to reboot.     After restarting the second server, I stopped getting complaints.

So far, there's been no re-occurance.   All servers in the cluster have been updated and rebooted.      I can't wait to see what sort of system specific, untestable situation will happen on the next round of 'Microsoft Updates'

After debugging positions and velocities between the various layers of OpenSimulator today, it appears that things are slightly better then I previously thought right now.

It looks like there's an error with ZeroFlag in one spot in UpdatePositionAndVelocity in ODEPrim that, when a prim is rezzed and made physical, causes it to drop through the terrain.

It also looks like there's an issue..   where if you drag the hand cursor over a prim the 'right' way, the SOG/SOP and ODEPrim no longer synchronize again.   If you bump the prim with your avatar where you would expect it to be, physics knows where the object is..   but the SOG/SOP doesn't.    So, that's our break.    Some kind of reference loss.    Isolating the specific state where this occurs should be an interesting task tomorrow, however, I think I've discovered enough for one day.

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <116.5574, 106.5194, 21.29421>

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <116.7664, 106.5418, 21.3075>

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <117.0615, 106.5566, 21.3036>

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <117.3505, 106.5721, 21.30312>

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <117.6379, 106.5873, 21.30292>

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <117.9243, 106.604, 21.30146>

06:27:40 - !ZeroFlag <117.9579, 106.6056, 21.30099>

06:27:41 - !ZeroFlag <117.9578, 106.6032, 21.30212>

06:27:41 - !ZeroFlag <118.1797, 106.6338, 21.31411>

06:27:41 - !ZeroFlag <118.4731, 106.6529, 21.30904>

06:27:42 - !ZeroFlag <118.7649, 106.6682, 21.30845>

06:27:42 - !ZeroFlag <119.0538, 106.6863, 21.30784>

06:27:42 - !ZeroFlag <119.3399, 106.699, 21.30552>

06:27:42 - !ZeroFlag <119.3714, 106.6974, 21.30613>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <119.3718, 106.6955, 21.30722>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <119.6014, 106.6931, 21.31141>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <119.8856, 106.7092, 21.31145>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <120.1725, 106.7264, 21.31157>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <120.2315, 106.7134, 21.33288>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <120.2231, 106.6987, 21.32208>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <120.2056, 106.7055, 21.30926>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <120.1871, 106.7195, 21.29576>

06:27:43 - !ZeroFlag <120.1709, 106.7317, 21.282>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <120.1709, 106.7309, 21.28252>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <120.3771, 106.7588, 21.27705>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <120.6764, 106.7718, 21.27605>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <120.9664, 106.7914, 21.27538>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <121.2548, 106.8121, 21.27536>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <121.3039, 106.814, 21.29639>

06:27:45 - !ZeroFlag <121.2975, 106.8158, 21.28955>

I had a look at the most recent trunk of OpenSimulator and I'm really surprised at how massively broken it is compared with previous versions.   Particularly the object and update pipeline is broken. 

It's broken enough that it will take a lot of work to unbreak preliminarily and then several weeks after that to test the system fully.   When it gets in this state, I get torn between frustration at how it got that way and tenacity to see the project succeed.     On the one hand, I'm extremely frustrated because it was working fine and I wasn't tracking the changes close enough to be able to figure out how it broke easily.  I wonder if someone else can resolve it easier because they were tracking the changes.   Then I remember that few people know that part of OpenSimulator like I do so, ultimately, the task will fall on me to resolve it.   

I think I'll debug it more this weekend.  Work comes first.     One of the reasons that I have not been tracking OpenSimulator changes closely is work has required significantly more of my time to complete then usual.   Normally, I have a full day's work that I get done. After that, I work on OpenSimulator. For weeks, however, it's been a full day's worth of work and then more work.   My work schedule is frustrating all by itself lately.  I'm not complaining really.  I'm arguing with myself.   About how long a task takes in estimated time, how long it takes in actual time.   Keeping projects on time, on budget and clients happy.   Maybe where I'm failing is managing expectations and i'm compensating by using time allocated for personal time.   I do have a vested interest in seeing my clients succeed in business beyond just 'finishing a project'.