The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Need A Better Camera

Also a tripod.

Heading out to the shops just after sunset, I noticed a really nice example of Earthshine and decided to go back and grab my camera and take a picture.

Which did not turn out at all well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Happy Birthday America!

I shall now take a short nap in your honour.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:07 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ah, That's Better

Thank you trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS3.  The beach just wouldn't be the same without you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

I bought 300 photo credits from BigStockPhoto today so that I could start gathering images for the Minx 1.2 theme library.  (I've already added 20 new standard themes, but now that I've found this resource, I plan to add many more.)

Then I realised that while the colour and composition were fine - I could tell that from the samples - I hadn't checked any of the images at a larger size for detail and artifacts.  Something you'd generally want to do before forking over $300.*

Fortunately, the level of detail is very good, and compression artifacts are barely noticeable even when you zoom in and hunt for them.  (In most cases, I can't see any artifacts at all.)  Since the images are going to be cropped and reduced anyway, the quality of the files is more than sufficient.

So look for some interesting new theme choices soon.

* If you spend $300, the photo credits are $1 each; if you spend less, they're between $1.40 and $2.50, so it make sense to buy in bulk if you intend to use a lot of photos.  Low-resolution photos (about 1 Mpixel) run 1 credit each, medium resolution (about 2 Mpixel) run to 2 credits.  I'm using the medium-res versions so that I get more flexibility in cropping and scaling - and because the end product can be up to 1000 pixels wide - so I get 150 photos for my money.  Which is great, because looking at other stock photo sources that allow use in web templates, the prices I saw ranged from $25 to $100 - and upwards - per photo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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We Interrupt This Rant

SofLayer have fixed their content delivery network.

I signed up (and have been paying for) this service the moment it was announced, because (a) it's cheap and (b) they have a very good distribution of nodes across North America, Europe, the nicer parts of Asia (Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong), and Australia.

Except their DNS was hosed, and I variously got routed to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, or Tokyo, depending on the time of day and the humidity.

This made a potentially great product about 98% useless.

But now, they've fixed it.  When I look for the local node, I get the local node.  Which is right here in Sydney.  14ms away.

I have accounts for it for both mu.nu and mee.nu.  I'll be integrating it into the system over the next couple of months.  What it will mean is that without changing anything from the user's point of view, all your files will be automatically backed up all over the world (free 20-way redundancy!) and will show up much faster for people who don't already live in Texas.

Your file URLs may change, though.  Instead of myblog.mee.nu/images/boobies.jpg, it will get translationed into something like cdn.mee.nu/meenu/myblog/images/boobies.jpg.  The old URL will still work, but won't be able to take advantage of the CDN.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:34 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You Can't Get There From Here

Unusually, I have a little money in my pocket at the moment, so I wanted to finally upgrade my monitor, which is currently a 19" model a few years old.  It is a very nice 19" monitor, but it's still a 19" monitor.  And I blew up the DVI input for Christmas, so it's currently VGA only.

In shopping around, I discovered the new Samsung T series monitors.  The T240HD and T260HD in particular have exactly the features I want.  If I could buy two, today, I would.

I can't.  They aren't available in Australia at all.  None of the T series are.

The other thing I'd like is a good way to run some virtual servers.  VMWare Server was just that.  However, you can't run version 1 on Vista 64 - Vista 64 demands signed drivers, and VMWare Server doesn't have signed drivers - and while I could run it just fine on Linux, I couldn't access the remote console because you can't run it on Vista 64 and I can't connect my Linux box to my monitor because the DVI port is dead so I only have the one input and I can't get a new monitor because the one I actually want isn't available and if I buy one I don't want then the next day the one I want will show up and I'll be out four hundred bucks.

VMWare Server 2 beta runs on Vista 64.  VMWare Server 2 beta is a bloated piece of crap.  They replaced the very functional remote console with a hideous browser-based bit of crapware that requires you to install Apache and Tomcat just to administer your virtual machines.  Leading to a situation where the VMWare Server download is 25 times the size of the comparable VirtualBox installer.

On the other hand, VirtualBox crashes horribly when you try to run Centos 5.2 as a guest.

If I could get virtual servers running nicely on my Linux box, I'd quite like to upgrade it to 12GB of memory using the new 4GB DIMMs that are available, for instance, from Kingston.  They're a little pricey, but they allow me to put up to 16GB of memory on a $100 motherboard instead of needing a $700 motherboard.

You can't get them in Australia.  Not even from Kingston's Australian office.  Who aren't answering my emails.

I'd quite like to upgrade the mu.nu server to 12GB of memory as well.  I can't get that either.  I'd have to do a server swap, which takes about 48 hours even if I spend two weeks planning it in advance.

And then there's semi-automated online stores.  Yes, I know it's the 3rd of July over there, but when I place an order for a downloadable software product, I don't expect the date or time to matter.  I expect instant fulfillment.  I can't rant about Digital Anarchy, though, because even though their ordering system requires human intervention, a human actually intervened and got my order shipped in a few minutes at 8pm their time.  So, um, good for them.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, my order for something - presumably either  Adobe Design Premium CS 3.3 or my new quad-core CPU - decided to arrive the moment I'm out of the office for four days.  Though I could pop into the city tomorrow if I really wanted to.  And I have the trial version of Photoshop to tide me over.

And OCZ have just announced the database-administrator-on-a-budget's wet dream: A 2.5" SATA flash-based SSD, boasting 120MB/s reads, 80MB/s writes, 0.3ms access times, MTBF of 1.5 million hours, and a price between $4 and $5 per GB.  32GB model is $169; 64GB model is $259; 128GB model is $479.  Again, if I could buy two of the 32GB models right this second, I would, but they aren't available in Australia.  Though again in this instance I can't complain too much, because they're apparently not going to be officially launched until next Monday.

Meh.  I think I'll go to lunch.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Most Common Super Power*








What?


* The Most Common Super Power

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Slightly Smaller Scale

I've ordered a Phenom 9750 (95W) to replace my Athlon 64 X2 5200+ (89W).  So for an extra 6W I go from  two 2.6GHz cores to four 2.4GHz cores.

It isn't quite as much computing power as the configs below, but it is an order of magnitude cheaper.

Update: Of course, today AMD announced three new Phenom models.  Strangely, none of them are obviously better for my purposes than the one I already ordered.  140W for an extra 200MHz is a bit steep, and more than my motherboard can deliver in any case.  65W for a 2GHz quad-core isn't bad, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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