This wouldn't have happened with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters.

Words And Colours

Here's a list of the words and colours available for menu items. Eventually I'll have a dynamic generator set up so you can use any word at all, but for now if you need other words you'll need to file a New Menu Item Request and wait a couple of hours.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 857 words, total size 17 kb.

Little Captions On The Hillside...

The font I've used in my banner, and on the mee.nu and mu.nu sites, is called Horatio.  Unlike the 300-odd fonts I've arranged for use in the banner generator, it's not free; it's owned and licensed by Linotype.  (I think...  Yep.)  I got it with some program or other years ago, possibly Lotus Word Pro, and I've been using it ever since.

But while I have a license, and can do whatever I like with it here at my desk, I can't put it on a server.  So those little words in the menu?  Static images.

I currently have 669 words in my list, including upper/lower case variations and plurals.  That's about 2MB of PNGs per colour.  I can run them through ImageMagick and get a slightly smaller file, but I can't seem to get an 8-bit PNG with working alpha transparency from any programmatic solution, so I'm stuck with 32-bits.  They do have run-length compression, so they're not that bulky.

So, 2MB of black text, 2MB of white text, and anyone who needs more words can just let me know and I'll rerun the program.

But if you need a different colour...  Well, okay.  I just updated the program to cycle through all 140 of the named web colours.  That makes 280MB of PNGs in about 100,000 files.

It takes about two minutes to generate a complete set for one colour - about five hours in total.*

I hope you're happy!


* Why so slow?  Well, there's a slight bug in the graphics library I'm using, and it can't keep the baseline of text even at small font sizes.  So I'm doing what amounts to 4xFSAA on the fly in Python.  Also, it's anti-aliased, composited, shadowed, defringed and all that good stuff.  And I'm running on a four-year-old Athlon XP.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 307 words, total size 2 kb.

Bottled Pointlessness

I bought a bottle of reduced-salt soy sauce.

Turns out, the main flavour of soy sauce is salt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:04 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.

Fish Milkshake!

I had a tuna sandwich for lunch.

Which may not seem like a big deal to you, but you probably haven't been living on rice crackers for the past ten days.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:49 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

Trblmakers

The CSS positioning attributes go clockwise from top - top, right, bottom, left.  I'm always expecting it to go top, left, bottom, right, and then wondering why the hell my site has gone stupid.

Tip: Think tribble.  Or trouble.  There, easy!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:35 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

Shiny!

I have found Nerdvana - a Javascript WYSIWYG editor that looks good, works well, and supports Safari and Opera.

It's called SPAW, but I won't hold that against it.

Downside - of course there's a downside.

A lot of the functionality is wrapped up in back-end PHP code, and I'd have to rewrite all of that.*  But that doesn't look to be overly difficult; it mostly seems to be configuration options and language support, so I can throw up one or two configurations and English-only to start with.

And it costs €250 for an Enterprise license.  But I can start with the GPL version: Since Minx is a hosted system, and the application itself is not distributed, I can do that.  At least, I think so; and if not, I can do a proof-of-concept with the GPL version and then buy the license once I know it will work.

Mootools - the AJAX library used in Minx 1.1 - also works across Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera.  The only other browser-side thingy I'm using is Flash, which again works on all major browsers.

So yay!

Update: Bum.  It generates hideous standards-based HTMLCRAP.  <span style="font-style: italic;"> my arse.

* That or set up a PHP server for the editor, which is also a possibility.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 214 words, total size 1 kb.

Error Message Errors

When Minx coughs and dies (which is rather less often these days, and usually due to network hiccups when it does happen), it produces a detailed error dump.  Not so helpful to the end user, but it also gets emailed to me automatically.

This error that I just got from Ars Technica is less useful:

479004966831 is an invalid value for m.

Um.  Okay.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

CSS Does Something Right!

Here's my new banner, starring Floofy McFloofersons, a lynx kitten.  (Or at least, new banner #1; I'm going to tweak the banner code to give me multiple banners in random rotation again.)

Now, with the new layout, banners are divided into four sections: An ad area (for ad-supported sites), either 60 or 90 pixels high; a system menu (optional for paid sites), 25 pixels high; the main banner image section, which is however big you want, and a site menu, 25 pixels high (plus a 5-pixel margin for the drop shadow).

So I was going to have the software slice the image up into four segments and load them individually.  Not perfect, but not a huge pain either.

But this is something CSS actually does right, of at least, right enough.  You can't specify a particular section of an image as the background for an element, but you can specify the position of the background image within the element.

Which wouldn't help much... except that the positioning can be negative.  So for the system menu, I just position the image at y=-60 (or -90), fix the height of the div at 25px, and viola!

Makes it a lot easier to manage things.  Each banner is one image.  If you don't quite like what comes out of the banner generator, you can just pop it into a paint program and tweak it a bit; no worries about keeping four different images lined up.

So score one for CSS.  This time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:06 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 253 words, total size 1 kb.

The Honey Files

Never before collected in one place: Three decades of Honey!

Not entirely work-safe. But it's Go Nagai, so duh.


Cutey Honey (1973)




New Cutey Honey (1994)






Cutey Honey Flash (1997)




Cutey Honey Movie (2004)




Re: Cutey Honey

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:59 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 40 words, total size 2 kb.

NFS Burpage

NFS has been up and down all day; this is causing problems all over mee.nu.  I have Softlayer tech support looking at it, and in the meantime I'm setting things up to run without NFS.

Update: De-nfstrated.  Which means we can only run on one of the servers, but right now that's less of a problem than the NFS going bloop every couple of hours.

Update: Tweaked some settings that shouldn't have needed tweaking, and left a test running.  We're still running on the local disk for now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 90 words, total size 1 kb.