Roughly one minute ago I "flipped the switch" on the new update server, which is now prepared to send every Wave Katana owner the new version =)
Update: The rollout went well enough, though initially a lot of people had to wait longer than expected for their HUD. The HUD programming is becoming a lot more complex than it previously was, not only consolidating the old Inventory HUD and the combat HUD, but also adding new features, and since Archanox is the sole maintainer of the HUD code, it made sense to not have to have all four of us worried about distributing the HUD and all of the associated concerns like permissions, etc. Unfortunately, with over 12,000 people using C:SI now, SL™ was getting a little behind processing all of the HUD requests 
Also, this from Ayame:
As some of you may have noticed, or may not have, there is a bug in our dueling system. If you end a duel in any way other than one of the two people dying, you run the risk of breaking the weapon where it may or may not cause damage to other people. We suggest if you are going to duel, finish them off! If you find yourself with a "broken" weapon and are fairly sure it’s from dueling, simply reattach the weapon to correct this. We believe we have already solved the issue and are going to test it tonight and tomorrow, and will release a patch shortly there after. If you find something you are sure is not caused by dueling, please let the creator of the weapon know, as this will allow us to fix it while patching the dueling system. We deeply apologize for the trouble, and we had tested this, but sometimes bugs do slip through.
This refers to the new ability to set up a duel with someone where you and your opponent are "locked in", and cannot damage bystanders nor can they damage you. This is an optional feature, but a pretty neat one. Unfortunately, if you prematurely end the duel by sheathing your sword or one of the combatants go out of range, the swords are still "locked in" but the duel is over, and now you can’t damage anyone. The fix is pretty obvious, or seems to be, and we will be testing it heavily to ensure that it works properly and will send another update as soon as possible.
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I’ve spent the last four hours optimizing my Vista machine, trying to get some semblance of productivity out of it. I’ve uninstalled over half my software, disabled all non-essential services, defragged all four hard drives, and even tweaked a few registry settings.
And it’s still the slowest operating system I’ve ever seen. I kid you not, I was more productive and my machine was FAR more responsive back in 1993 when I was programming in Borland C++ on a 80386 running at a scorching 33MHz with an 800MB hard drive and 32MB of RAM. In DOS.
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud (startling both my wife and my cat) when, after all of that trouble, I got the following dialog when attempting to perform a little maintenance on one of my rarely-used directories :
And you know…. It’s only funny because it’s true 
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Damnit. I may be the only person I know that has trouble EVERY SINGLE TIME they update an existing Ubuntu installation. Earlier this week I did a dist-upgrade on the machine that I’ve been using to host my bots, naively believing all of the blogs I’d read gushing about how this new version was the "best evar" and how the update was so painless.
You’d think I would have learned by now. While this update didn’t completely hose my machine like previous updates have, it take a great deal of time and in the end left me with no way to run my bots from that machine. I don’t know at this point if the problem lies in the version of Mono (or if the Mono version was even different) or whether it’s a more fundamental problem, but this version has a SIGABRT from an issue somewhere in the appearance code.
The bots were working before I did the dist-upgrade, and were not working after, but I suppose it’s also remotely possible that the problem is related to Second Life® rather than Ubuntu. If that’s the case, I should be able to get the latest version of libsecondlife and ensure that the bots are using the latest SL™ protocols, but I REALLY hate to do that because the libsl guys have no idea of what it means to have a stable interface; They change the public API of the libsl code on a daily basis, and this makes it incredibly difficult and time-consuming for anyone to maintain a non-trivial project dependant on libsecondlife.
The libsl team have done a pretty fantastic job of putting together a codebase that you can use to build custom viewers, bots, SL™ <-> RL integration, etc, and are to be commended for all of their hard work, but I often get the feeling that the majority of contributors have not spent a lot of time deep in the trenches of a large commercial software project where different teams maintain different subsystems and critical libraries.
Okay, enough ranting for now. I had hoped to have the bots ready for public usage at the same time as the new C:SI update, and have been testing them in secret for the last several weeks on a few of the sims where my wife and I have large chunks of land, but this setback will most likely mean that the bots will be delayed.
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Last night, out of a mix of sheer desperation and curiosity, I tried the new Electric Sheep viewer for Second Life®. I’m not at all interested in the CSI New York or related TV shows - I hate them vehemently in fact - but I wanted to see if the viewer was easy to use and whether it would afford me a better in-world experience than the official viewer.
Well, during an all-too-brief test, I was able to remain online for approximately 30 minutes before crashing. This custom viewer has the maddeningly annoying habit of always logging in to one of the regions made specifically for this TV show despite my telling it I want to sign in to my Home location, but hey if it’s better I will use it anyway, advertising and all - and if you’ve ever heard me rant about advertising you know that’s a huge concession from me.
Unfortunately, my testing was far from comprehensive because my in-world time was interrupted by my wife injuring her back and requiring immediate medical attention. It will be at least another day before either of us are able to get in-world again for more than a few minutes to catch up on IM’s and such, but I have C:SI (the REAL C:SI, Combat: Samurai Island) obligations this weekend that I am pretty confident I’ll be able to meet.
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