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

Sunday, December 27

Cool

Baldur's Gate 3

Little Warden Pixy, running through the Deep Roads,
Picking up the darkspawn and bopping them on the head!
When down came the demon godmother...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:50 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 27 words, total size 1 kb.

Anime

Ponyo-Free Zone

Went out shopping today, found zero copies of Ponyo on the shelves.*  There was a gap in the P's at JB Hifi, though.

I did find volumes 5-8 of the Midori no Hibi manga, so I snaffled those.  (I already had 1-4, then it went out of print.  Looks like it's been reprinted, yay!)

And picked up a few things on the Steam sale:
Braid  
2.49 USD
World of Goo  
4.99 USD
Indigo Prophecy  
3.39 USD
Audiosurf  
2.50 USD
Rome: Total War Gold  
2.49 USD
Beyond Good and Evil  
4.99 USD
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time  
4.99 USD
Subtotal  
25.84 USD

Lumines Base + Advance Pack  
2.99 USD
Evil Genius  
1.99 USD
Assassin's Creed  
9.99 USD
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (AU)  
1.49 USD
Space Trader  
1.99 USD
Heroes of Might and Magic 5  
4.99 USD
Subtotal  
23.44 USD
Some of those (Space Trader in particular) didn't get great reviews, and others (Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil) are a few years old, but when you are paying as little as $1.49 a game, it can't hurt to take a few chances.

Update: Poop.  Wasted $5 buying the Heroes of Might and Magic 5 pack just now, instead of just getting the expansions as I'd intended.  I realised about half a second after I clicked Confirm.  I will now go and kill something virtual to make myself feel better.

* Maybe because it's not due out until Tuesday...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:57 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 226 words, total size 7 kb.

Thursday, December 24

Anime

Stupid Fish!

Why is Ponyo being released on DVD the week after Christmas?!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:51 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 13 words, total size 1 kb.

Wednesday, December 23

Rant

What The Hell, Dell?

I was looking at server pricing to see what it would cost to buy some sizeable web/database servers outright. Answer is: Not that much. A Dell dual quad-core Nehalem server with 72GB of RAM runs about $5600. But the drive prices!
1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5" Hot Plug Hard Drive [$579]
That's some markup you've got there, Mr Dell. A 1TB Seagate desktop drive costs $90; the server version (which is  the same hardware, but different firmware) costs $160. Dell's storage prices are pretty much a deal breaker. But at some point I ended up on Dell's Australian site, where the exact same server gives me this option:
1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3.5 " Hot Plug Hard Drive [$311.30]
Wait, what? I know that the Aussie dollar has strengthened against the US dollar of late, but not that much.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 139 words, total size 1 kb.

Tuesday, December 22

Geek

Nine Horrible Programming Languages That No-One Will Ever Use, And Lua

Well, it's more honest than the original title of the article.

One thing language designers keep forgetting is that syntax matters.  Your language may work semantic magic, but if it's unwriteable and unreadable, programmers will ignore it.  And that's the sad truth of nine out of the ten languages mentioned here.  Lisp and Smalltalk were never successful and never will be, and it's clearly not because they lack expressive power.  It's because the syntax is so goddam ugly.

Logo has the power of Lisp and a syntax that's only a little weird; unfortunately, it got pigeonholed as a children's teaching language.  The rest of the Lisp derivatives are just plain horrible.  Smalltalk and Objective C too.  And don't get me started on Forth.

Lua has some annoying quirks that keep it from being the perfect language. For example, you don't have named parameters in function calls, but you can fake it by using an f{} call instead of an f() call.  That makes perfect sense in the context of Lua's design, but it's confusing as hell for a new user.  Oh, and it uses .. as a string concatenation operator, which is just vile.  Overall, though, it's clean enough for me to adopt it as the new Minx scripting language.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 221 words, total size 1 kb.

Rant

Voltaire May Be Dead...

But as far as I know, the First Amendment* has not been repealed.

One of the most** enjoyable parts of my hobby (and would-be business) is waking up in the morning and checking my mail (e- or snail-) to find that someone wants to sue me for something one of my bloggers has said or done.

Citing "hate speech" laws* of some city***, as though the internet were a local newspaper, just adds to the piquancy.

* Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's not complicated, people.

** As in, least
.

*** The Fourteenth Amendment reads in part:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:41 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 221 words, total size 2 kb.

Monday, December 21

Rant

We Hates Them

Aargh.  Computers.  We hates them.  We hates them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:05 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 11 words, total size 1 kb.

Saturday, December 19

Cool

Torchlit

If anyone is interested in a pretty neat Diablo clone by some of the original Diablo developers, Torchlight is only $10 on Steam this weekend.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:13 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

Tuesday, December 15

Geek

Early Christmas Present

iiNet just bumped up my monthly quota by another 60GB.  Despite downloading Dragon Age and Mass Effect on Steam and all five Debian DVDs, I didn't hit my quota last month, so I don't know what I'll do with it all.  (Actually, about 40% of the Steam downloads and all of Debian came from iiNet's free zone and didn't count against my quota anyway.)

Well, I could go down to the next cheaper plan and still have more bandwidth than I did after the last increase, or go down two steps and have nearly as much bandwidth as when I signed up.

Or I could subscribe to every podcast on the planet, rather than (as now) only half of them.

Or I could just run daily off-site backups of the whole of mu.nu and mee.nu.

Decisions, decisions...

If they'd done this two days ago I would have had the extra 60GB for last month as well...  And would have had to somehow use it all in a day.  Oh, and they don't count uploads at all, so seeding torrents is out.

They've also bumped the shaped speed (what you get when you exceed your quota) from 64k to 128k.  Still really really slow, but only half as really really slow as before.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 215 words, total size 1 kb.

Monday, December 14

Anime

Kimi Ni Todoke'd

And just like that, everything was alright, everything I'd been stressing out over was put back into perspective.

This is such a good show.

WATCH IT!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:36 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 29 words, total size 1 kb.

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