Many of you who have used the latest release candidate, 1.18.4(0) have probably noticed that the tooltip popup on the map that shows you the number of people in a sim/region.. well, doesn't actually show you the number. Instead it relentlessly reports zero for every sim except the one you are in, where it reports one (that's you).

How did this happen? Well, when you modify or refactor code, there's two important requirements. First, you have to know how to code. Second, you have to understand what is going on. Lacking the first is less dangerous. You can go safely stick pencils up your nose. Lacking the second, however, means you risk sticking pencils up everyone else's nose. This bug was relatively harmless, if irritating.

Today's release candidate doesn't seem to be winning a lot of hearts and minds out there today. The public JIRA issue tracker is accumulating problem reports, many of which seem - just darn peculiar.

Aside from crashes, virtually all of them seem to be related to the user-interface, and new ways in which it behaves (or misbehaves). On the Second Life development mailing list of late, there has increasing discussion of scrapping the existing user-interface code (which is tangled up in, well, everything) and changing to something more modular and discrete.

At present, as the complaints go, the user-interface code and some of the back-end code have become such an organic tangle that it is difficult to change one without affecting the other, and that some theoretically simple user-facing changes have become monstrously involved.

That appears to be the sort of thing we are seeing here. Changes that should be quite straightforward causing an extensive tangle of dependencies and concomitant unexpected issues.

Linden Lab advises that the grid will be updated to 1.17.1 on Monday, 25 June. There will be a rolling restart at a time not yet specified. An optional viewer update with some bugfixes and minor changes will be available Monday.

A mandatory update and full grid downtime will take place on Wednesday, 27 June - implementing some of the changes that will make long-downtime updates a thing of the past, and supposedly improving overall backbone throughput and reliability.

That's two updates due next week. Fun times.