St Patrick Dancefloor

St Patrick day is coming... Let's have a dedicated party with this new dance floor now available at Oggy's Scripted Items.

So what can you expect from this new product ? Beer of course, dancing leprechauns, drunk leprechauns... oh and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow too !

As usual, configuration is done through a simple easy notecard, and enables you to adjust many settings :

• rainbow and pot of gold placement : the rainbow smoothly "opens" from one corner of the dance floor to the opposite corner and periodically changes corner ;
• number of characters : just choose how many characters you want for your dance floor, just make sure you can afford the prims on your land ;
• flashes : choose how the floor will "flash" (gradually change its color glow etc.) and how often it will. This can of course be deactivated.

The floor is freely resizable and the objects (rainbow, leprechauns...) will automatically adapt to its size, position and orientation !

Note that because of a bug in the current releases of Firestorm and the SL official viewer (see here and here) where objects that go transparent sometimes do not reappear, two versions of the dance floor are included : one fades out and in leprechauns while they move and the other just moves them. 

Alternative viewers like Lumiya are not affected by these bugs and let's just trust LL and the Firestorm team to fix this as soon as possible.

Google App Engine Launcher

Recently I have been developing a web application in python in order to keep track of customer data in an update service. I used the wonderful Google App Engine framework and it does really a great job at providing a powerful and easy to use development environment.

However, I have been pulling my hair about the App Engine launcher that gets installed when you install the SDK on windows: while running my application from a local command line, the graphical user interface insisted on showing my application (added through the "Add existing application..." menu) in red, indicating an error. But which error ?

Today I found out why ! This is all because of an Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) in the app.yaml ! I was using the great Notepad++ to edit this essential file for the web application but was not aware that it was encoding it as utf-8 with BOM (which is an invisible mark at the beginning of the file).

Removing this BOM (in Notepad++'s Encoding menu, see image below) worked and now the launcher sees my application when I want to test it locally! Yay... I hope this tip is useful to someone.