Cristiano

<rant>
Why does Linden Lab so often make seemingly arbitrary changes without alerting those who it will affect? I am livid right now. Their postcard format, which has remained consistent for the past three years (other than when the image sizes changed, which they did give warning on), suddenly without warning tonight had a major change made to it. Apparently it was a rolling sim change as well, because not all postcards coming out of SL had the same change on them until late today, but it resulted in the lost of hundreds of images sent to Snapzilla today.

Previously, in the comments of the postcard, there was information you could extract to tell who sent the postcard, what sim it was from, and the coordinates. This has been consistent since 2005, in a simple format. Yet, without warning, today, it changed to this format:

<!-- BEGIN POSTCARD DETAILS
agent_id=0d2d7814-8b2d-4db1-81b8-96b507104e89
username="Cristiano Midnight"
region_id=41ed3567-71a8-02a9-0f73-8b933a010737
sim_name="Mavericks"
global_x=256893
global_y=254787
local_x=125
local_y=67
local_z=84
END POSTCARD DETAILS -->

This broke the image processing on Snapzilla, which deleted the images it could not handle. It took hours of work to try to figure out what the hell was even happening. I am not very happy with LL right now. Change is fine, but good lord, they can at least announce it. I wouldn't even hope for notification personally at this point, but I imagine this bullshit is probably buried in some release note or JIRA, if at all. Am I ranting here for nothing and just totally missed it? I cannot find reference to a change anywhere, certainly not one to explain it slowly changing over time on a Monday sim by sim.


</rant>

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Willow Matthews

If you knew me at all you'd know I am totally incompetent in these matters. But I'm fucking good at hugs.



(Let me know if a giraffe will help kk?)

Malachi

I don't think many quite grasp just how dysfunctional their operations are. I can only claim experience as in a former life part of my work was to go into software projects in that state of disarray and make them work.

As I'm sure you've noticed, they've never had technical writers; there has never been any documentation. Any number of releases demonstrate that they have no revision control. I don't mean they don't have a revision control system - code control is easy - I mean that no one has any idea what comprises what build, what deltas will work correctly with each other and which won't. At present there are at least 4 versions of the windows client, all which contain disjoint subsets of the code base. How can they have release notes that are just plain wrong? How can they roll out builds only to rescind them within the hour? Because there is no gatekeeper, there is no librarian. All of the difficult, tedious work involved in making sure that you can recreate yesterday's build today is not present because no one ever really knew what made today's build.

As you have seen, it is no longer cute. Perhaps they changed their format to conform to flickr's desires and literally no one understood the implication it would have upon snapzilla. Maybe they just changed it because someone needed to show that they did something last week and their boss can't discriminate between useful effort and "pushing papers" around the desk. Yes, I've had to reform pathological development teams in the past, but I'd never encountered anything nearly as bad as this.

From the new format you posted, perhaps you should be glad that a regexp can discriminate between old and new and that another can parse the new form. My guess is that if you could interview all the staff there, perhaps two knew that the change was made, one knew why, and another had any idea it would bork snapzilla yet - of course - wasn't aware that the change was being made.

This same sort of was why I stopped coding at release 1.3 as it broke about 3/4 of the code I'd written to that point, with no warning whatsoever.

Penny Patton

Someday, we'll all look back on this and laugh.

Of course, we'll all be sending our postcards from Deep Grid at the time...

mcgeeb Gupte

This is the only thing Linden Labs is good at and that is pissing people off.

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Clancy Sullivan

I do not endorse Linden Labs.

Holy shit, what a dumb thing for them to do. There's no overall supervision there, it's all compartmentalized chaos, apparently. Snapzilla is pretty popular yet they don't think about the impact that their changes could have on that community service? What are they trying to do, break it and replace it with one of their own?

Ray Figtree

/me wonders: Why did they make the change? Did it need to be done? I'm sure no one even thought of the effects it would have on Snapzilla.

This is such a sad thing. Not just for this particular misguided effort, but for all the ones that have proceeded it.

The corporations have already come and gone. Soon the little guy will go as well. How long can anyone be asked to put up with such incompetence?

The answer, of course, is until competent competition comes along.

Can't get here soon enough.

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Ned Easterwood

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FlipperPA Peregrine

ARGH.

Thanks for the heads up Cristiano - this'll affect my blogging project as well. I got f'd in the a by Linden Lab a few times - once while on vacation in New York - when they changed the format of the transactions page (with absolutely no notice) and borked SLBoutique transactions. That was a fun conversation: "Sorry, Jenn, you'll have to go to the Manchester museum of art alone, so I can fix this for our customers. Meet up with ya in a few hours."

She's a saint.

Regards,

-Flip

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Cindy Claveau

Cris, I wouldn't even file an AR or JIRA. I'd call their silly asses on the phone and read them the riot act.

Snapzilla is an SL tradition. It's one of the most brilliant ways SL has been integrated with the web, long before LL got it in their heads that they wanted to go that direction.

Don't let them play phone tag. Find out who made this boneheaded decision and explain to them what they broke.

FlipperPA Peregrine

In addition, Cristiano, wasn't it Linden Lab who prodded you into starting Snapzilla as a third party service? You think they'd remember.

Travis Lambert

The developer that made this change obviously thought it was trivial and would affect no one. This means that it could change yet again, with no warning - because they're under the false impression it doesn't affect anyone.

/me shudders to think of what would happen if they similarly changed the format of outbound HTTPRequest header tags.

FlipperPA Peregrine

This is why I keep so many versions of deprecated code. Linden Lab tends to undeprecate frequently, and yes, I think I just invented a new word.

Ten

And people wonder why I'm suddenly so disenchanted with Second Life. HMMMMMM... might have something to do with the developers.

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Ingrid

We love Snapzilla. Hope you get it sorted out!

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Khamon

Wasn't it Linden Lab who intercepted your submissions to publish on their website sans credit to anyone as well?

There was no notice of this that I saw or can find now. You've been Flippered you have.

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Ten

We should all just up and stop logging in. Unfortunately, it seems that all they will listen to is a mass... and masses are hard to organize.

Khamon

I didn't log in at all yesterday; don't think I did Sunday either except for a few minutes to work with a customer. That's most of my Second Life now; watching the mail queue to see if I need to assist a customer. I also make a point of attending Robin's meetings on Tuesdays; but she'll be out these next two weeks so today may be null as well.

Ten

What's Robin do for you?

FIC.

Daisy Rimbaud

Wouldn't surprise me to be honest.

Of all the useless things to be doing ...

Cattrina Careless

why not? its not like Snapzilla is a poncy little fly-by-night web page. Snapzilla is a large part of the SL community and LL certainly does know you exist

Cristiano

The irony is the embedded comments were added for Snapzilla in the first place at my request so that any service processing the postcards could have a standard way to get the avatar name, sim and coordinates.

Cristiano

Flipper,

I ultimately decided to have it detect the new format and convert things into the previous format to minimize the amount of stuff I had to rework, and to keep backward compatibility in case they backtrack on me without warning. Let me know if you want to know what I did.

Cristiano

I sent Torley a pretty hostile email lol but otherwise, I am not even sure of the point of bothering. They have no qualms about changes impacting and damaging things, a pattern they have shown over and over because of the sheer lack of oversight or structure to what they are even doing anymore.

It may make me feel slightly better to let off steam by yelling at someone, but instead I just focused my energies on getting Snapzilla back up today. Torley did write back and say he would find out what happened, so I'll see what he has to say before deciding who else to contact.

Cristiano

Yes, once I demonstrated it to Philip and Reuben, the next thing I knew I was getting the hard press from LL to have it ready so they could announce it on a certain date in a really short time frame (ie like three days). I did get it finished, and Snapzilla did have the rare distinction of being on the SL home page, sign in message, inworld announcement and community site all at the same time.

Initially, LL was very supportive of it. Things soured between us when they started intercepting images being sent to my site and funneling them through the home page of Secondlife.com, with no credit to my site, totally unannounced to me.

I got all kinds of flack for it (well ok, mainly just Prokofy complaining really loudly) and I didn't even have any control over it. After going ballistic, they did put "Powered by Snapzilla" briefly, but then it disappeared. Ultimately, the feature disappeared altogether on their home page, and now they promote Flickr.