Linden Lab and Vivox are taking the voice system down for maintenance tomorrow morning (Wednesday, 24 October) between 2AM and 3AM SLT (US Pacific) for unspecified improvements.

Could this have anything to do with the projected influx of CSI:NY fans tomorrow? It would be too coincidental to suggest otherwise. Apparently Linden Lab has been robustifying a number of subsystems, particularly the user-registration system.

Zee Linden, Linden Lab's CFO, will be conducting a voice town hall on VAT issues for European residents. The Town Hall is to take place on Monday 8 October at 11AM SLT (US Pacific) at the usual place (the big stage in Pooley).

If you don't have voice available, you will need a voice-enabled friend to handle asking questions and transcribing answers for you.

Zee Linden has attached the VAT FAQ and answers a number of additional questions in his posting. Zee adds, "If you have more questions, I encourage you to download the VAT FAQ, refer to our knowledgebase, send me a message in-world, or come to the discussion Monday (again, please come prepared with voice enabled so you can hear, as I'll be answering chat questions by voice to be most efficient with the time.)"

Here's an interesting oddity. If you're using the Steam Community Beta, you may have noticed that it allows you to add external programs to the games list. I thought I'd add in Second Life and a couple of my non-Steam-based diversions.

Steam works quite neatly as a launcher for all of that sort of thing. The interesting thing is the steam community overlay, which operates in virtually everything you run using Shift-Tab, like you would to bring the overlay up in regular Steam titles. Here it is running in Second Life:

Now that was an unexpected feature. Access to your friends list, IMs, voice-chat, and all that, like it would from any other Steam game.

Now... why can't I get my viewer updated via Steam, so I don't have to worry about downloading updates, hmm? Meh. It probably costs rather more to get your stuff in there than people want to pay.

I'm hard of hearing, as I've said before. Whilst I can hear, at least a bit, if I concentrate on voice without lipreading I can manage about 5 minutes before I get a headache. Given I'm prone to migraines as well, I'm not so keen on this. Over the last week I've been on the periphery of two voice only events - I use the term advisedly.

The first was after a class where a group of people gathered and chatted in voice. Until one of them IMed me to tell me that was what was happening I really didn't have a clue. Since I can't hear what they're saying, I was instantly, albeit briefly, totally excluded. The second was a presentation at NMC. In all fairness to the NMC people they found me a transcriber with almost no notice and I managed to follow what was going on pretty well. Kudos, and many thanks, for both looking and stepping up to do the job at no notice to all those involved.

So, Second Life is now 'fully voice enabled'. That means that assuming your network can handle it, and your hardware can handle it, and you've got a headset, and your office policies don't forbid it, and your family lets you use it you're just fine.

Unless, of course, you are one of the 1 in 100 Second Life users who uses the popular open source operating system Linux - a number which is increasing - it has been observed that Second Life runs better on the same hardware if that hardware is running Linux rather than Windows.

Where the heck is the holdup? Now, that's an interesting question - and depends entirely on who you ask.

The voice system is currently undergoing live maintenance until Midnight. That means service may cut out at various times in various areas. I know that some of you are inclined to say "So, just business as usual then?"

Linden Lab aren't saying what work is being done, just how long it is going to take. We assume it's the nebulous 'improvements'. The system still has a ways to go, though I know that a number of you never seem to have any difficulties with the voice system at all.

There have been oodles of reports about voice issues today. The talk session with Biz Stone (of Twitter) at Dr Dobbs Island had to revert from voice to text today when the voice system simply failed to perform.

Linden Lab are announcing a short-notice maintenance downtime for the voice system in a few hours, from 2AM SLT (US Pacific) to 3AM SLT. Sunday's voice performance after the last maintenance downtime was reportedly much improved, but reports are that it has significantly degraded since then.

Linden Lab says the voice system will be undergoing maintenance from 2AM SLT (US Pacific) to 4AM SLT on Sunday morning, 5 August. Voice services won't be available during that time.

You might wonder how that differs, exactly, from Friday morning's voice outages. Well, it'll be down for less time for one thing, and this time you'll be expecting it, right?

As we head towards the final deployment of 'bHear' or voice (we'll call it bHear for simplicity further down) in the official viewer (possibly as soon as next week or the week after, depending on which sources you listen to), debate is getting stronger - not on anything to do with the segregative issues surrounding text and voice, but on a rather more interesting practical and psychological effect: The user interface cutting you off from the virtual world.

Linden Lab have released a new First Look viewer, updating the user-interface, and fixing some bugs relating to the voice implementation: "We've made a lot of changes based on your feedback over the past few weeks, particularly to the voice user interface and the Communicate window."

Of course, the largest issue, that of the window's size, remains to be addressed. To open the window large enough to see any sensible amount of chat history more or less just blots out your view of everything else. It's not a show-stopper, mind, but it's the one aspect of the voice User Interface that I hear the most complaints about.

The First Look browser is a beta-test browser that runs against the main (agni) grid. If it eats your inventory, your files and your dog, that's at your own risk. You can download the First Look viewer from the usual place.