A few updates and a look into the future.

 Scanning progress

The scanning has slowed down considerably this week, but for a few good reasons. I still am in the process of rewriting the whole thing as a regular app instead of console, as discussed in the previous blog.  But to speed things up a little in it's current form, I broke down the information gathering in small sections, so that if, for example, we meet someone we have met before, we can scan only for missing info. For example, let's say the avatar on file does not have a profile picture, but when we come across the profile again, it has one now, then only the new picture gathering is done instead of re-processing the entire avatar  as if it was new.  This has speed up the process tremendously as it seems that we are starting to see a lot of people we have seen before.  I had to add a few fields on the information being gathered, so splitting the process in small chunks was very beneficial. As an example, I never captured the avatar rez-date before. But I thought it would be a good idea to have. That mean I had to rescan 24000 profiles just to add that date. Had I not split the info gathering, it took on average 2.3 seconds per profile to scan for everything. Now, assuming all I was missing was the date, it went down to about 1/2 second per. Sometimes a little more if there was anything else missing.  But they're all done now, and we're back to regular scanning.  Here is our current status:

Apologies

I had to apologize.  In it's current state, it looks like the bot entered a parcel, was ejected, but then was stuck re-trying this location repeatedly. You can imagine how annoying it quickly became. Not only can it be an inconvenience to have a bot drop in unexpectedly, but to have that bot try over and over again to enter your parcel can certainly be viewed as harassment.  Thankfully, despite that frustration, Chandler dropped me an IM when I happened to be online, and mentioned what was going on.  I had a quick look, identified the problem, but by then it was 2am, so I just turned it off and told Chandler I would fix that, and apologized for the intrusion.

The other thing I see from time to time is parcel owners sending IMs to the bot instead of directly to me. Although I get to see them eventually, it's a lot more efficient to msg me directly instead of the bot.  That's why I have my contact info in the bot's profile. That's how Chandler tracked me down, and the issue got resolved quickly.

Quiet week

Things have been rather quiet this week to be honest.  I have relocated to a new SL home, mainly because I found a rental place that cost me nearly nothing, and seeing as I don't really need a whole lot of land/prims for what I do, this works better for me.  It's big enough to have a large house on it.  It's a skybox, so it de-rez when nobody's home, but I can live with that.

RL has also kept me fairly busy, so I didn't spend nearly as much time on SL as a regular person, or working on the bot as I normally do.   So between that and spending time playing around with bodies, shapes and clothing, I didn't get to do much.. Whenever I had time to sit down it was usually in short spurts, not long enough to get too involved in any project.

Upcoming

Well, I have some sort of a plan in mind.  First, I need to fix the irritating issue of the bot trying to enter parcels where it got ejected from. I also want to spend some time figuring out how I can avoid visiting multiple locations in the same parcel. It is not needed as the bot can see everyone in the area without being right next to them.  So if, let's say, someone used a specific location on their Picks more than once, there's no need for the bot to try and TP there repeatedly.  I currently have nothing in place to prevent that.   Fixing this would resolve two separate issues.  First, it would stop the bot from being annoying, as described previously, and second, it will make the whole process much faster. Imagine a parcel that has 30 people in it. Imagine if I have a list of 10 Picks to visit but they're technically all the same place.. This means 10 attempt to teleport to the same place and re-processing 30 people 10 times.

Once I get that fixed, I'll keep going on the rewrite.  This rewrite also gives me an opportunity to look at some of the code I have (If you do any type of coding, you might be familiar with the "What was I thinking?" when you see some stuff you've done) and improve it.

Although I will most likely keep the technical updates on the bot, I also want to start including some other things in this blog, such as some gems I come across, or provide some (free) advertising for the things I buy, or places I visit.  I think there is an opportunity here to lighten things up and offer some information that maybe the less seasoned Second Lifers out there might benefit from. 

Until next time...

Thanks again for reading. I hope this is somewhat informative, or at the very least entertaining for you. Have a good week!