As Akela previously indicated, Havok4 is indeed out on the preview grid. Andrew Linden gracefully donated some of his time answering a few questions and he will be available for office hours this weekend. Should you want to chat with him directly:

Go to the Brampton Linden Stage (Brampton 106/166/25)

This Saturday September 29, 2007 08:00 AM PDT

Tuesdays 21:00 PDT (ongoing)

Thursdays (starting October 4, 2007) 08:00 PDT

Thanks for your time, Andrew!

Of all SL activities, scripting is the most arcane art. I once took a Basics in Programming course just out of curiosity and came away with an abiding fear of the numbers 1 and 0. So when I hear about a book like Scripting Recipes for Second Life by Jeff Heaton, I think two things: 'Cool, this will help residents create even more fun things for me to play with', and 'aaiiieeeeeeeeeeeee'. Which of those two comes first depends on how vulnerable I'm feeling at any given time.

Homework Assignment: Someone who's into scripting buy this book and let me know if it's full of good things. Oh, and I love the cover art! So dreamy!

(Via prnewswire.com)

We're not talking about a quantum leap here (the smallest possible discrete movement that is still definably a motion), but more like a largish step forward. Babbage Linden reports that the last major showstopper issue with the Mono common language runtime appears to be solved.

Babbage's primary concern was with memory usage of the Mono runtime engine, which kept increasing over time. Normally that memory would be given back when the runtime terminated, but there are always scripts running in a simulator, so the runtime would only terminate when the simulator restarted or shut down (which it would, a good deal sooner with the script runtime continuing to hungrily consume increasing amounts of memory).

Babbage and Cory linden went off to the Lang.NET Symposium and gave what I think is one of the best talks ever seen on Second Life. It is over an hour and a half of conference joy. You can watch it on the read link. It begins with a high level overview of Second Life, covering old classic stories as well as some new ones I had not heard, and then quickly began to delve into more technical specifics. In this they talk about improving performance and revamping the scripting language.

Apparently the original Liden Scripting Language (LSL) was put together MacGyver style with a Swiss Army knife and some duct tape, and much like MacGyver we could build anything. Little did we know it was a slow and cumbersome anything that could be optimized if only Linden Lab would do something like say covert the code to Mono, an Open Source version of .NET, thus allowing for the use of the Common Language Interface (CLI). CLI would be able to run more efficiently allowing for more complex scripts that operate across sim lines, as well as allow code written in any CLI compliant language to run within Second Life (Like VB.Net, C#, or JavaScript). Lot for this to become part of Second Life soon.

A posting from a new user in the forums, reminded me that it isn't initially clear to newer people just how useful the forums can be. I can remember visiting the forums, feeling confused by all the headings, alarmed by how aggressive some people seemed to be, and then unsure how helpful they could be to me, when I first started in SL.

The SL forums are currently the best place to find official announcements about down time or updates, a good place to find information about new products or events, and a brilliant place to ask a question about SL. Even if you only "lurk" and don't post, they can be very useful indeed.

One of the most useful automated searches is hidden in the bar across the top: "new posts". Clicking on this will throw up a list of new posts since you last visited the forums, newest first, and enable you to see what the current hot topics are, and scroll down the list to find anything of interest.