This is the eighth in a series of interviews that are being conducted with new residents, in order to gauge the effectiveness of the orientation process, and to gauge disparities between the preconceptions and the realities of Second Life. The questions may be tailored slightly for each interview; responses may be edited for purposes of clarity.

I met Simon through the main NCI members group IM channel. For a newcomer, he is quite with-it as regards his appearance, general movement and interaction with Second Life; his concerns focus more on the social and ethical concerns of age verification and the technological considerations of the sex industry in Second Life.

Joshua Linden (Joshua Bell of Linden Lab) points out that a key memory leak fix didn't go ahead with this version as planned. In his own words:

In a really unfortunate "You suck, Lindens!" move, the big leak fix (updating to libcurl-7.16.2) was reverted before the release. I have no excuse. We screwed up. As penance, several of us spent the rest of the day (this was after the long deploy this morning) getting things back into shape. -- [SLDev mailing list]

This particular leak consumes around 250MB per hour on some systems. Linden Lab are hoping to release 1.17.1 as an optional viewer update hopefully early next week, along with a pile of other viewer bugfixes.

In the meantime, you may want to run the Nicholaz edition, which for me, neatly stays under 100MB of RAM the whole time I'm running it. All the caveats about third-party binaries apply here. You have to trust that it does what it says it does and nothing else, of course.

Second Life's updating to 1.17.0 (err, again, after the previously scheduled update), and will be down from 6am to noon tomorrow 13 June. Although it seems a bit last-minute, preliminary release notes have been made available today. For the hard of reading, voice is not a feature in this release, though new voice features will be available on the beta grid.

This release is pretty much a bug-fix release, primarily containing fixes from resident developers. The man of the hour, in my opinion, is Nicholaz Beresford. While many people have contributed many good fixes, Nicholaz has been tirelessly trawling through the code hunting memory and resource leaks, plugging them and getting the changes tested. I've been running his patched viewer for some little time now, and it's the best viewer experience I've had with Second Life so far.

Since this is getting a bit spammy trying to fit everything together, I'm going to put down what we have so far in hopes that we can finish this soon:

• We first saw Cubesque, given to us by a Linden. Soma-X speculated that it was owned by one Kyle Machulis with cube@lindenlab.com as an email. Mars Rickenbacker gave us the address on the domain registrar which leads to Linden Lab's headquarters.
• The title of the page is, "perfection is not 90." The beginning of the page says "the journey begins here", while the end of the page says "the journey ends here."
• Cubesque had variables which OneBigRiver Stork calculated to lead up to an event at exactly 9:46am PDT on Friday.
• Nicholaz Beresford pointed out that the blocks were given a corner number.
• Maxx Monde pondered about whether we would get chamfered cubes.

Click to read more conclusions as this will be long-winded, but hopefully clarify some things ...