Socially|Mundane

The problem with dip-shit idiots is that they are dip-shit idiots. There are too many people who will spit into the soup just before they deliver it to your table for no reason other than to piss on your parade.

These people are everywhere. In the chat rooms and other social places they are known as trolls (in Second Life, we call them 'griefers' - but it's the same smelly pile of cow-shit.) They often also are 'flamers', but their main gig is to find people having a good time, enjoying whatever they are enjoying and then to do or say whatever the can to not only ruin the party, but actually destroy any progress made to whatever end.

So when KirstenLee Cinquetti gained fame through a featured mention on New World Notes, considered the premiere news aggregator for all things Second Life, the trolls came out of the woodwork.

The mention was not the first. Kirsten is a developer and takes the code released by Linden Lab and others and compiles it into her own SL Viewer. What makes her viewer so popular is that she is implementing 'disabled' code that allows the viewer - with the right computer hardware - to dynamically render 'live' shadows in your SL scene.

I don't have that hardware, so I passed and though I am interested in her progress, it is only a passing interest. As technical as I am, I am no developer, so comments she makes on her blog sound more or less like gibberish to me:

Okies this morning as I downed my second coffee a post came my way on SLdev Commits. Yikes and Blimey LL have been busy! Long story short 1.23 118354 commit so took S17 and merged the commit interesting changeset lots of new code and fixes here n there. Granted the code is still verry alpha had several crashes and nvidia driver borks once in a while. But stick with me on this one decided to build it anyway, all ran well but still the alpha issues remain ( thats a real pain for film makers ).

[From Kirstenlee.Cinquetti]

My excitement jumped when Kirsten released a "regular" viewer. One that I could run and on top of that, she managed to make it the most efficient, stable viewer I have ever used. She calls it her "S16" viewer.

All the comments to the mention on NWN garnered raves and cheers. Then the troll came out. Whining about whether she was "legal" by not providing the source code as required by open-source licenses and blah... blah.

This troll no doubt stirred-up a windstorm of vitriolic nonsense. Kirsten did what anyone would do. She decided it wasn't worth the BS and killed her web site, made all her builds unavailable. The troll kills a great thing for everyone over trivial bullshit, even though Kirsten bent-over backward trying to comply.

Well I am happy she's back. Her blog has returned and she's releasing her "Sahdowdraft" viewer for public consumption again. Although the good news is she has returned her most recent build of the S16 viewer. But it's the same build that was available before as she has vowed to not release "public" versions of her viewer again... because of the trolls.

Though I am happy to (hush-hush, wink, wink) whisper into your ear that there may be a surprise there, too.

Welcome back, Kirsten. I am sure you know you have a thousand-times more supporters than detractors. Unfortunately it only takes a few of the loudmouth trolls to poison the entire city's water supply, ruining it for everyone.