AjaxLife Blog

Having left AjaxLife for about a week, I came back to it last night and added person search, partial profile viewing, and arbitrary IMs. Yay.

Known issues

• Session IDs, while now more consistent than before, are still not consistent enough to actually prevent conflicts resulting in “Lost IM” messages. On the plus side, they don’t crash it any more.
• The image in the profile tends not to load. There are a range of issues causing that, which will hopefully be fixed at some point.
• The server still dies under load.

Here’s a nice screenshot!

It’s in revision 13 on the Google Code project.

I have released AjaxLife’s (very ugly and hackish) code under the revised BSD license.
You can find it at http://code.google.com/p/ajaxlife/.

For added fun, most of the code was lost at some point (file corruption due to an OS crash) and had to be recovered by decompiling.

I will write some documentation-type-stuff at some point.

AjaxLife has moved to another server - you can now find it at https://ajaxlife.net/. It’s not actually any more powerful; it’s just not serving any other tasks. This has the advantage that AjaxLife has more resources to play with, and it won’t bring everything else crashing down with it.

It also now has Spanish and French translations - pick your language of choice on the login screen.

Spanish translation

French translation

[21:33] Fixed an error in the copying that resulted in not all the JavaScript files being loaded, resulting in a perpetual “Loading subsystems…” message.

[The next day, 20:57] Fixed perpetual “Loading subsystems…” message that only affected the MG - I hope. Same screwup as before, that wasn’t actually quite fixed.

So, the school year is finally finished, as of noon today. Woo! To coincide with this, the server running this site suffered a hardware failure, and everything had to be moved over, resulting in just under three hours of downtime. Meep.

Since SL is down, AjaxLife isn’t running, and server load is much lower. And I can work on chasing some annoying bugs too. Wee. And adding features and other fun stuff.

This post has the most categories per word on this blog. :p

This time the server was killed off by excessive load. But it’s back now.
Working on preventing this happening again..

And no, it didn’t get overloaded. I did something stupid.

I had to restart Apache while at school. However, I forgot my only means of accessing the server was via Apache. So apache stopped, and that was that.

After two hours and fifty-five minutes, I’m back. (and my server had a much needed rest)

I see someone linked to me - all that traffic’s directed at AjaxLife. It does now work on the MG. Oh, and it doesn’t work on Safari 2 - use the Safari 3 beta or Firefox instead. Alternatively, if anyone with access to Safari 2 can help me work it out, that’d be appreciated too.

Being able to search profiles, etc. is coming.

This server will be down for maintence for an unknown length of time starting at 18:00 BST. It will have more RAM and disk space when it comes up - hopefully helping with the strain that AjaxLife places on the server.

While the server is down, TSL Profiles and *.katharineberry.co.uk. will be down. Additionally, the web functionality of the HUD Thingy will be down, and my maps will fail to rez. >.>

Thank you for your patience while we work to make things run faster and crash less.

Due to some combination of boredom, wanting to talk to people in SL, and inspiration from a vague memory of something Interfect Sonic did, I decided to start work on an AJAX based SL client.

It’s still under heavy development, but the result so far is an application/page/site called AjaxLife.

Post updated for r13

Post not updated past r13. See the AjaxLife category for up-to-date information.

Features

• Basic map
• Teleports
• Accepting/declining teleport offers
• Local chat, instant messages (now fully supported)
• Inventory received notifications
• Friend on/offline notifications
• Balance change notifications, etc.
• Person search
• Partial profile viewing

It also correctly logs you in and out, and notifies you if you were disconnected for any reason.

Known issues

• If you’re on the TG and you zoom out too far, the top half gets chopped off.
• Both grids can see each-other on the map. (Is that an issue?)
• Sometimes SL sends the teleport messages in the wrong order, resulting in the modal teleport wait dialog never leaving.
• Teleports sometimes complete without notification that they ever started.
• IE tends to screw up with dragging the map

Obligitary snapshots

Known supported browsers

• Firefox 1.5+
• Safari 3 (and the latest WebKit nightly as well)

Browsers with minor issues

• Internet Explorer 6/7 (background image tends to flicker, odd script error)
• Opera 9 (annoying keyboard focus issues)
• Wii Browser (works fine, but the layout is slightly off)
• Safari 2 (Buttons are positioned all over the place)

If you want to use it, and trust that I won’t look at your password (which I can’t, and nothing that this does is logged, but you should always be careful and stuff), you can test it at https://ajaxlife.net/.

If there’s enough interest I’ll make a version that you can run on your own machine to connect to, once it’s further developed (e.g. starting IMs, profile viewing, possibly inventory management, etc.)

Please leave any comments you may have.