Nicholaz Beresford has declared Bug Hunting Season over. If you don’t know Nicholaz, well, you missed a good opportunity to radically improve your Second Life experience. For quite some time now, Nicholaz has been building patched, bug ridden versions of the Second Life You-Know-Where viewer, rooting through its source to hunt the elusive critters with a dedication and perseverance matched by none. I have been wondering at each new Linden viewer release how anybody could keep this up, each iteration breaking most of what Nicholaz did (and this despite him making his patches available to the Lindens) besides introducing a plethora of new bugs. Nicholaz just groaned and started to integrate his patches all over again, then rooted out the new bugs until his viewer, much unlike the official one, ran smoothly, did not leak memory all over the carpet and generally abstained from the nastiness the official viewer seems prone to.

Well, at last, Nicholaz has decided this is not worth neglecting his first life. As sorry as I am from the very egoistical point of view of the happy « Nicholaz Edition » viewer user, I have to applaud his decision. If Sisyphus had let the damn stone just lie, and gone home, he couldn’t have felt as relieved as Nicholaz must feel. The last version of his viewer, running quite smoothly, is still available here. Go and grab it while it’s still there (editions for Mac OS X and Linux to be found here).

Nicholaz, we will miss your work, but we won’t begrudge you your life. Thank you for everything ; you’ll forever be on my list of unsung heroes.