Artist Vlad Bjornson opens new avenues for expression through his Sculpted Thoughts art piece. The morphing sculpture impresses the eye with a smart mashup of sculptie functionality and the Second Life media interface. The sculptie object is coded to take on a new shape as it cycles through the textures from a QuickTime movie stream.

SL limitations in this area were surpassed with some clever and custom scripts made by the artist. For example, Bjornson's sculptie is updated at a speed of almost 8 frames per second in order to maintain a smooth animation (see the machinima demo above). "If sculpties reacted to the video stream properly, [the motion] would be totally fluid [...] SL probably doesn't pick up the changes otherwise", explains scripter Candide LeMay.

Thanks to Gwyneth Llewelyn for the tip. You can see the sculpture yourself at Caledon Highlands.

A rolling restart is under way at the moment to fix an exploit in the permissions system, relating to scripts. The exploit was first reported to Linden Lab on May 11 this year, when Hazim Gazov announced it on the Voter 5 blog as a part of their updated copybot, called D35V-bot (a corruption of the Japanese copula desu which can be very loosely translated into english as 'to be'/'is' or occasionally 'equal'). The substance of the exploit allowed any script in any object to be transferred to a user, permissions notwithstanding.

Until the last 24 hours or so despite numerous reports, nobody was apparently able and willing to provide a repro to Linden Lab that could be used to verify and fix the issue. Second Life resident Ethan Schuman apparently provided the information that Linden Lab needed to test and isolate the issue, and as each simulator restarts the security hole should be closed.

Well, even though this last update was a major rework, there seem to be a few too many annoying mid-level issues with it. Random prim drift (particularly evil); WarpPos broken (WarpPos relies on advertised features of llSetPrimitiveParams() that went away this update); Scripts not starting; The slew of asset and inventory problems since Wednesday; Some bonus sim crashiness; Attachment issues on tp's or border crossings (how much fun is it to teleport, wondering if you're going to re-rez at the far end with your heels and emblematic rose sticking out of your ass, hmm? - Definitely led to some very embarrassing arrivals at meetings, recently).

There's a rolling restart 'shortly' to fix some of these issues, as well as to apparently address other, unspecified problems. Rolling restarts move from the top of the map to the bottom, so if you get the warning that the sim you are in will be restarting soon, teleport a few rows of sims to the north to get behind the 'wavefront' of restarting sims.

If you mean, are you being served map textures, apparently neither me, you or 25,750 other Second Lifers are right now. Word is that account balances are not updating, object inventories are apparently not opening. Some official client scripters are reporting crashes when they try to edit scripts. Only a few people are reporting inventory transfers failing at the present time, but there are scattered reports of L$ transfers failing.

Something's obviously not right. No word from Linden Lab, and if it's an overload condition there's no sign of any restrictions being put up to limit the damage. We'll just have to wait and see. We are not near what would be considered peak concurrency at the present time.