Published on 30th of September, 2007
in AjaxLife.
AjaxLife has moved again!
It’s now hosted at ajaxlife.net. This is less typing, and doesn’t require one to spell my name correctly. 
I have updated the (self-signed) SSL certificate accordingly. As such, expect to receive certificate errors when trying the old one, if you had your browser set to trust my certificate (probably a good idea, because if it changes you know something’s up).
While I try to keep everything redirected (the original URL, https://secure.katharineberry.co.uk/ajaxlife-s/login.kat continues to work – as does http://ajaxlife.katharineberry.co.uk), anyone who linked directly to the login page (with /client/login.kat) will find that it is not redirected, and they instead remain at the old URL, with an SSL certificate for ajaxlife.net. Which isn’t nice.
So, in future, please just link to “http://ajaxlife.net” when linking to AjaxLife. (Not that anyone does any more. The damage is already done there. >.>)
Thanks! 
The three, in my opinion, most annoying bugs in AjaxLife have been fixed:
- AjaxLife would stop receiving messages, although you could still send them – FIXED (well, at least one cause of the bug is)
- Incoming IMs would not be shown in the IM window, but instead in a short-lived “Lost Instant Message” noticed – FIXED
- Accidentally leaving the page would cause you to leave the page without confirmation – FIXED (actually a new feature, but still really annoying)
So yay!
You can now pick a grid to log into. Yay. Note that the two marked as “UNOFFICIAL” should not be used unless you know why you’re using them and what you’re doing. Also, those two still use the SL map. Also note that I couldn’t get the DeepGrid login server to respond (what URI should I be using?), and OSGrid didn’t work – login worked, but the UI didn’t load, instead throwing an odd exception.
I’m reluctant to allow arbitrary login servers, because I can imagine all sorts of ways to abuse this.
We still default to “Main Grid (Linden Lab)” – i.e. Agni.
No thanks to Linden Lab, I’ve fixed AjaxLife. It no longer relies on the map API – it instead builds up the missing data based on MapBlocks. It was already doing this to fix capitalisation, but was also assuming that sims already existed in the map API. As such, assorted assumptions had to be removed and various changes made (plus there’s now a really ugly bit on the server side for logging in, yay. >.>)
Note that this has two side-effects – you may have to wait a while before any given sim can be focused, and it can no longer tell when you’re trying to select a nonexistent sim. It’ll just consistently fail, and ask you to wait a bit.
But hey, we’re back!
[20:29 BST] And now it doesn’t exist at all. Hoping they’re doing something other than ignoring it… 
[20:03 BST] It’s not fixed. The file now exists, but doesn’t have any region names. So it’ll still crash out. Boo LL people.
[20:00 BST] Apparently it’s fixed, at least for now. Yay LL people!
LL seem to have pulled the MapAPI (yes, I know that’s a 404. That’s the problem.) without any form of announcement. So much for their blog.
Some research indicates that they have intended to do so for a while, and were going to make a wide announcement before doing so. Breaking it does not count as a wide announcement.
As such, AjaxLife (which was heavily dependent on the API for the map functions, among others) will no longer function. Furthermore, the replacement lacks an important function to make it work, is still in beta, still has assorted voice-map related things hardcoded in.
Additionally, I don’t want “Powered by Google” stuck in the corner of AjaxLife. Especially since nothing was wrong with the old one – well, at least, not my fixed version of the old one (now also broken due to loss of its data source).
So, Linden Lab. Until you do something about this, AjaxLife is dead.
After a lengthy death due to the inconvenience of working on it (rebooting into Windows. Which I hate.), AjaxLife development has resumed – mostly because I finally convinced Windows that activating on a virtual machine on the same physical computer (but under OS X) wasn’t actually illegal.
So some work has taken place. Most noticeably, the login page was redesigned, and the pointless “Begin” link removed. Additionally, there was some cleanup of the texture download code, with the nice side-effect that you get a spinning “I’m doing something!” indicator where the texture is to be. It’s also more reliable.
I also updated it to the latest libsecondlife – slightly tweaked, because it was causing mono to segfault whenever it received appearance information – so I just commented out the code that was killing it. Yay for laziness. This probably means that you’ll now be ruthed when logging in, however.
Known issues, probably carried over from before:
- My copy of Safari 3 has developed a hate of the return key for unknown reasons – which also applied to the old code. Not sure what’s going on there.
- The inventory folder name bug still exists, although now you get a message along the lines of “Could not fetch reply from login server.” instead of an exception.
- Firefox refuses to render scrollbars. I assume that the scrollable elements have decided to inherit the “overflow: none;” property. I’ll have to look into that.
If you refresh the page your online friends aren’t reloaded. – fixed 9/22/07 when rewriting friend handling.- Probably a load of other stuff I forgot.
It might crash less too, if I’m lucky. Try it here.
NOTE: I removed the bit about not stealing your password from the login screen – be assured, however, that it remains true. I just couldn’t fit it on. It’s still in the HTML source of the login page though.
Having actually been there (I’m fairly sure I was invited so that I’d write nice things about them, to be honest), I can now say things about them and not be clueless as to what I’m saying. Yay!
The problem is, I don’t have much positive to say. Let’s see…
- They’re obsessed with their public image and publicity.
- They put publicity before anything else.
- There are a couple of real jerks there – not the fault of the project, but Edi and, to a lesser extent, marsbar9 (name says it all) really ruin the experience.
- Excessively paranoid.
- Censor everything.
- Pop out of thin air to flame anyone who might disagree with them. (Decimus, I’m looking at you…)
- It’s a dull place to be anyway.
- Bureaucracy is rife.
In all honesty, you’d probably find more engaging creations and discussion at “Sandbox Island (TG)”, “Sandbox Island (TG) 2″, “Sandbox Island (TG) 3″ or “Sandbox Island (TG) 4″ on the main TG.
It’s a shame – all the adults (that I met) are nice, and most of the students are fun too – but the whole experience is destroyed by a small group of them, and partially by the odd censorship.
My advice would have to be something to the effect of “Keep away from them.” Sorry, the vast majority of people there. Especially Decimus. I generally liked him, although I suspect he’ll be the one who appears to flame me.
New SL-client-type project:
More details will come shortly. 
