Ambient Irony

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
What? Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here.
Boom. Sooner or later... Boom!

Wednesday, February 29

42!

As Douglas Adams wrote of a rather different president:

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

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Tuesday, February 28

4.2!

Eight years late, but finally here: A mainstream microprocessor that runs at more than 4GHz.

At its launch in November 2000, the Pentium 4 ran at 1.5GHz, but it did less per cycle than the Pentium III or Athlon, and wasn't all that great. Particularly since Intel initially tied it to the overpriced and underwhelming Rambus memory.

In 2001 Intel reached 2GHz, in 2002 2.8GHz, and by 2004 3.8Ghz.

And there they got stuck. Unable to increase clock speeds, they went back to the drawing board, abandoning the Pentium 4 for the Pentium III-derived Pentium M, Core, Core 2, and now the i3/i5/i7 family.

And eight years later, neither Intel nor AMD had reached the 4GHz barrier at stock speeds (not overclocked or turbo mode). My new systems can reach 4.2GHz in turbo mode, but standard speed is only 3.6GHz.

IBM will happily sell you a 5GHz server if you have the money, but for mainstream systems, the AMD FX-4170 has the fastest clocks around.

Unfortunately for AMD, a slower clocked Intel i5 2500 will run faster for most applications, but I've been waiting a long time for this, so let me enjoy it for a little while.

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Sunday, February 26

Call Me Pixy De Medici, Patron Of The Arts

'Cause I just commissioned some chibis. smile

I was looking at new notebooks the other day, and you know, my old notebooks are just fine.* I'd much rather spend the money getting some artwork to dress up the place.

I can write, I can program, I'm okay on design, I've even created some half-way decent music, but I'm not an artist. So finding someone to partner with on the art side of things could really spark some activity around here.

And if it doesn't, then worst case, an artist gets some pizza and I get some cool drawings.

* Plural because a couple of years ago, in a moment of weakness, I bought two. That actually worked out really well; my notebook before that got beaten to death getting shlepped about; this time I got a light-weight model that fits safely in my backpack and a bigger one for use at home, and they both still look and work like new.

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Saturday, February 25

Deviated

I've wanted for some time to have better logos and logotypes, and if possible, mascots, for the mee.nuniverse. Ideally I'd like to get a co-ordinated set of logos and mascots for each of the domains and system components.

I don't know if I can afford to hire a serious professional artist, but I can afford some commissions on deviantArt. The problem there is finding the right artist, because there are a lot of them, and a lot of them are good.

I like this for mascot characters. It's not exactly a chibi, but I think it strikes a perfect balance of simplicity and clean lines, wholesome cuteness, personality, and just a touch of sexiness.

For logotypes, this guy seems to have it together - clean, clear, and simple.

I don't know if any of my readers follow deviantArt, but if you do and know of artists you think would suit, and who are open for commissions, please let me know.

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FreeD

DAZ 3D, purveyors of 3D models for... Well, for 3D modelling, I guess... Has jumped onto the razor-blade business model with both feet. For a limited time, they've reduced the price of three of their modelling tools - DAZ Studio Pro (for 3D illustration), Bryce Pro (for procedural landscapes), and Hexagon (for creating and editing 3D models) to...

Zero.

DAZ Studio is no Maya, but it's quite functional, and you certainly can't beat that price. Obviously they're betting that more users of the software will mean more sales of 3D models, and that's where they make most of their money. I hope it works out for them, and if you're at all interested in 3D art, go over there and download the programs and try them out.
more...

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Wednesday, February 22

Farewellaria

Development of awesome 2D mining engineer training system Terraria has apparently ceased after the very welcome expansion late last year. Two of the original three developers left to pursue other dreams and I can just imagine the feelings of the remaining developer, trying to meet the demands of a million (literally) fans.

Fear not, though, because there's a new game coming from one of the Terraria developers that is basically Terraria in space. Terraria in space with penguins.

Starbound.

Update: More Starbound.

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Two-For-One Kittening

Speaking of old-school RPG awesomeness, GOG are running a two-for-one sale on all D&D games right now - Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale I & II, Planescape: Torment, the complete Neverwinter Nights, Dragonshard, and Demon Stone.

Plus, if you buy any of those games you get Temple of Elemental Evil free. Okay, some might view that as a minus, but it wasn't that bad. razz

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My Kittens Just Had Kittens

So, Double Fine, the game company headed by Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts) has raised over $2 million on Kickstarter for a new old-school adventure game - five times their original goal, and still going strong.

This has not escaped the attention of other developers of classic games. Brian Fargo (founder of Interplay, creator of Bard's Tale and Wasteland) plans to launch a Kickstarter drive very soon to develop a sequel to Wasteland.

If you're not familiar with Wasteland, it's the predecessor to Fallout. Fargo didn't have the rights for a direct sequel, so the Black Isle division of Interplay developed Fallout as the next best thing. Possibly the next better thing, because Fallout is a gem.

And Obsidian, the present incarnation of the aforementioned Black Isle, are also looking into the idea. As Black Isle the team created both the original Fallout games, both Icewind Dale games, and Planescape: Torment, possibly the best computer role-playing game ever. They're currently busy with a couple of projects - they do a lot of work-for-hire - but they have a lot of projects they never got to complete in the Black Isle days.

It's unlikely that we'll ever see the original vision for Fallout 3 or Baldur's Gate III due to licensing issues, and Torment was a massive project, with 800,000 words of text (about twice as much as Lord of the Rings), but a just-plain-fun party-based isometric dungeon crawler like Icewind Dale is something that likely could and would be funded through Kickstarter.

I loved the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale I & II, and Planescape: Torment) and if they were still making them today I'd still be buying them. So if and when those projects show up on Kickstarter, I will leap on them, cash in hand.

Brian and Chris (Avellone, of Obsidian), you hear me? However many of these projects you think you can deliver, me and my money are ready and waiting.

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Sunday, February 19

Katawa Shoujo

Right. That reminds me why I don't like this sort of game.

I don't have any problem at all with the game subject or material; they're fine, and deftly handled. It's the shallowness of the decision tree that I have a problem with. At least when Mass Effect screwed you this way, you could mostly either apologise or shoot someone. Sometimes both.

Right now, I give it a big meh.

more...

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1 KS isn't really a game, per se. It's more like a giant "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 19 2012 04:37 PM (ZNgWw)

It's more like a giant "Choose Your Own Adventure" book.

That's the point he's making. You don't get to choose much. Rins path is the worst in that regard. Hannako's is by far the best as far as logically relevant choices.

On balance I liked most of the characters, and 3 of the 5 stories, but I agree that gameplay was lacking.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, February 19 2012 05:12 PM (EJaOX)

3 I note that Katawa Crash has more actual game play (you can slow yourself, give yourself a boost a limited number of times and of course choose your initial trajectory)...you also get to kick Hisao around and there's a sharktopus, (which the VN sorely lacks).

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, February 19 2012 05:20 PM (EJaOX)

4 And that's my point (which I also made in my review). KS isn't a game by Western standards, and comparing it to Mass Effect, even in passing, isn't fair to either.

If you object to calling KS a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, then I'll just call it five novellas wrapped together by a computer program. There is no gameplay, just a lot of reading.

Having said that, I had more fun reading KS than I have any of the last five books I've picked up.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 19 2012 05:30 PM (ZNgWw)

5 The problem I have is that you're presented with two or three choices, none of which are quite what you want to do, and which don't accurately represent what your character will do or say (a sin which Mass Effect also commits, which is why I mentioned it) - and then you just press the space bar for a long while.

If you read the credits, you'll see they had a writing team, an art team, a music team... And no-one at all on game design.

I agree that it's a fun read, and the characters are engaging. But I think that all that creative work is sadly let down by the shortage of meaningful choices.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 19 2012 05:56 PM (PiXy!)

6 I'll give it another go, to get some more of the story out. I do like the story (so far). It just needs about three times as many branch points.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 19 2012 05:59 PM (PiXy!)

7 The real culprit there was, the, er... "development cycle", I guess you'd call it. The first chapter was produced as a demo/test the waters/holy shit this is really happening piece, and actually has a lot of decision points and branching etc etc. But the rest of the development doesn't run with that at all - if you don't end up on the Kenji bus, your ride will take you completely to the end of one of the girls' stories.

A game developed in more organic fashion would have spaced that out more, so that you didn't have a Future Destiny With _x_ by the school festival. But it would have also been a long, hard slog with the initial development team - they needed to have something out there to convince people that this was a real, serious project devoted to taking what sounds like a terrible joke of a concept and making a good experience out of it.

That said, there's something to be said for the roller coaster. Contrast with Type Moon's stuff, for example. The Tsukihime game had a bunch of branching options, but only a single determiner between whether you were on the Arc path or the Ciel path... and it wasn't the game asking you "so would you prefer to be bonking Arc or Ciel" either. It was entirely possible to go into the game and play it with a strong preference for one character, then do that particular choice wrong, starting you on the path for the other with massive, insuperable penalties (because, well... Ciel very much does not like Arc and Arc's just jealous in general.) So your game was doomed at that point... but it wouldn't say "oh yeah, you're so dead by now", you'd just play for a few more in-game days wondering why you're suddenly getting all these Ciel scenes when you'd been a lot more friendly with Arc.

Which is to say, designing these stories with a lot of branching points is hard, because an "oh darn, nobody likes you very much" ending is a highly negative experience, especially if you can't exactly work out what you did wrong. FSN had a few problems with this too. If you're playing the game worried that answering "wrong" when you get asked about your favorite vegetable will result in hours of wasted gameplay, you're not going to have as much fun.

Some games get around this by having a strong default option - Sakura Wars (not exactly a dating sim...) rigs it so it's quite difficult to get EVERYONE mad at you, and even blundering your way through the game without much of a focus will have you end up with Sakura. Other games get through it in this fashion - you've got choices that can lead to different scenes, but in ways that aren't story-important (the infamous White Ren/Black Ren selection event...) Some games just blow it and become crapware.

It's fair to say that KS doesn't have a whole lot of user interaction, but eh, it's a visual novel. More interaction doesn't necessarily equal a better experience.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, February 19 2012 09:43 PM (GJQTS)

8 More interaction doesn't necessarily equal a better experience, but in this case, and for me, it definitely would.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 19 2012 11:25 PM (PiXy!)

9 Hey, Pixy. I can't log into blog.mu.nu. I'm getting an Internal Server Error page. Could you have a look at that? Thanks! :-D

Posted by: Tuning Spork at Monday, February 20 2012 11:40 AM (yh6+P)

10 Spork, I'll get that fixed ASAP, but in the meantime try the backup login at blog2.mu.nu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 20 2012 03:49 PM (PiXy!)

11 Pixy,

Do you remember when I whined incessantly about the spam on Ace's blog, and you finally tried to block me while you and Den Beste shamed me for my awesome ability to whine about stuff?

Well, sorry for all of that, but more importantly, congratulations on fixing the spam problem! If it's not a secret, how did you accomplish it?

*fingers crossed that it was one of my ideas*

Posted by: Kevin at Monday, February 20 2012 07:26 PM (3o64G)

12 I'm not sure exactly what did the trick. I updated the spam filter to scan the database for repeat offenders, find all the IP addresses they use, and ban them en masse.
I also spent several hours manually identifying spam and zapping the hell out of it (and banning people the same way).
It worked a lot better than I'd expected; spam levels have gone way down.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, February 20 2012 09:12 PM (PiXy!)

13 Thanks, Pixy! The main login is still out, but the backup worked like a charm.

Posted by: Tuning Spork at Monday, February 20 2012 10:25 PM (yh6+P)

14 Original address should be happy again now as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 22 2012 11:42 AM (PiXy!)

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It's Not An Addiction!

I was browsing around Kickstarter yesterday, looking for cool projects to throw money at, and there aren't actually all that many that excite me, having already tossed cashbombs in the direction of Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick reprint drive and Rob Balder's Efrworld motion comic project.

One that did catch my eye, though, is The Adventures of the Salamander. It's a series of children's books based on a story the guy wrote when he was five, and recently found while going through stuff his mum had kept (as mums are wont to do). He's now a freelance artist and has illustrated a number of books, but this is the first time he's both written and illustrated something.

Unlike Rich and Rob, I don't know this guy and can't vouch for him, but if you scroll down you can see that he can sure draw some nice salamanders. I thought it worth a few bucks for a PDF set.

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Tuesday, February 14

Signed, Sealed, And Soon To Be Delivered

Bumped and updated.

I'm getting a complete signed collection of all seven volumes of the Order of the Stick from the OotS Reprint Drive on Kickstarter.

Also (as at last count since the bonus goodies are mounting by the day), 8 new limited edition OotS comics in PDF format, a set of original high-resolution OotS wallpaper, a Roy Greenhilt fridge magnet, an 8x10 art print, two sheets of OotS stickers, two OotS-themed notepads, and three OotS colouring books, the OotS Deluxe Edition Adventure Game, and a new limited edition expansion set.

In other exciting Kickstartery news, Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts) was looking to raise $400,000 to produce a new old-school adventure game after being turned down by publishers because there's no market for old-school adventure games.

In one day, he's signed up 33,000 fans and raised $1.2 million.

Update: And now Erfworld is in too. If you're a fan of strategy games, particularly fantasy wargames, you'll love Erfworld. Or if you just like interesting stories and neat artwork. Or cuddly dragons.

So, that's PDF and hardcover copies of Book 1, an armoured decrypted red dwagon plushie, Blu-Ray/DVD of the Erfworld animated comic, and a Stupid Meal.

It's a good thing I didn't spend any money at Christmas, because I'm spending it all now...

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Bits

All the parts for Shana and Lina have now shipped, except for the black Lian-Li drive bay adaptors (convert one 5.25" bay to four 2.5" bays) which are expected late this month, and the Sapphire 7950, which is now in stock at the distributor and should arrive this week. (Update: Shipped!)

I also added a Lian Li EX-503 to the mix - a little (7x9.5x10.5 inches) USB3/eSATA RAID array which nicely complements my existing Lian Li cases and gives me somewhere to put all my spare disks.

So Shana will be configured with a 4TB C drive, a 4TB D drive, and an 8TB E drive, all RAID-5 - something of a step up from the 1.5TB C and E it now has (with E mostly set aside for the daily backups).

All that remains is to cart it all home from the office and put it together.

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Monday, February 13

I Liked It So Much, I Bought The Source Code

I mentioned in my recent post on InnovaStudio's Live Editor that while it was a great improvement on the already good Innova Editor, it no longer came with source code, which was now an extra fifteen hundred smackers. In fact, that was the only thing I didn't like about it.

I think they may have been listening, because they just cut the price for the source license from $1500 to $600 - and then offered a 50% introductory discount on top of that. Since that also includes another year of support and updates for the editor itself (which I was due to pay pretty soon), that's not too bad a price, and I paid it.

Another piece of software I was looking to license for mee.nu costs $24 for a single-site non-commercial license, $199 for a 100-site commercial license.... And $75,000 for an OEM license that would allow me to integrate it into Minx. Nice though it is, we won't be seeing that one any time soon.

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Saturday, February 11

Luvin' It

Luvit is Node.js for a language that doesn't suck.

Unless you carefully pronounce it as loo-vit, though, the name is pure cheese.

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Friday, February 10

Kickstartled

Given the runaway success of the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter drive, I wonder what it would cost to produce new games like the original X-Com, Master of Orion II, or Master of Magic, with exactly the same gameplay but higher resolution graphics.

Or Syndicate, or Populous, or... Ooh, Cannon Fodder.

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Thursday, February 09

5 Accessories Every Man Should Carry

Hedgehog

You never want to be without a hedgehog; they make great company, and in dire extremis, good eating.
Deck of cards

Handy if you need to make friends and they're allergic to hedgehogs.
Can of spam

You can feed it to the hedgehog, and the empty can has a huge range of uses, such as a hedgehog bathtub.
Clawhammer

Fight off zombies, drive nails, pull nails, light fires, catch fish.
Towel

For wiping up incriminating evidence. May also have other uses.

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1 Can of spam

You can feed it to the hedgehog, and the empty can has a huge range of uses, such as a hedgehog bathtub.

Uh, exactly how big are Australian hedgehogs? Or, alternatively, does spam come in super-economy-size containers in the antipodes?

Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, February 10 2012 01:30 AM (jwKxK)

2 These are conveniently-sized pocket hedgehogs for accessorising.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, February 10 2012 11:10 AM (PiXy!)

3 Mitch, think of this: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/hedgehogs-as-pets.html
For small messes, you can use a hedgehog as a towel.

Posted by: RickC at Saturday, February 11 2012 07:53 AM (cHo1D)

4 Yeah. We don't have hedgehogs in Australia (and they're not allowed as pets), so I had in mind the African pygmy hedgehog, which is a common pet species elsewhere, and could just about have a bath in an empty Spam can.
Local equivalent is the echidna, which is bigger than a hedgehog but smaller than a porcupine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, February 11 2012 10:08 AM (PiXy!)

5 After the rabbit fiasco, I can imagine that the Australian government is leery of other potential invasive species. So I'm not surprised they're banned as pets. If they were pets, soon they'd be in the wild.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, February 12 2012 02:55 AM (+rSRq)

6 There was a plan floated recently to import elephants to eat a kind of invasive African grass. Realistically elephants wouldn't be a problem - they're too big and the breeding cycle is too slow - but it's still funny.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 12 2012 09:02 AM (PiXy!)

7 Wait, I know how this goes--when the elephants overrun the place, you thin 'em out with crocodiles!

Posted by: RickC at Sunday, February 12 2012 11:05 AM (/5bLf)

8 ...and when you're armpit deep in crocodiles, you give sniper rifles to the koalas. When they run out of ammunition, then and only then do the hedgehogs come.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, February 15 2012 03:38 PM (Zg0Yp)

9 The koalas already have sniper rifles, Wonderduck. In fact, many of them have been upgrading to 20x110 anti-materiel rounds for dealing with the spiders.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, February 15 2012 07:15 PM (PiXy!)

10 Well, they need something that large to shoot Huntsman spiders.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, February 16 2012 08:11 AM (+rSRq)

11 I slouch corrected. Maybe they can call in airstrikes via sugar glider, then.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 19 2012 01:50 AM (ZNgWw)

12 That might work. The flying foxes are okay, but tend to get panicked when there's AA fire. Sugar gliders are much more manoeuvrable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 19 2012 09:02 AM (PiXy!)

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Tuesday, February 07

All I Want For Christmas...

Is a database with the structure support and low latency of Redis, the document support of MongoDB, the indexing of Lucene, the robust persistence and map/reduce views of CouchDB, the compact on-disk representation of Kyoto Cabinet, the datatype support of PostgreSQL, and the scalability of Riak.*

Just put a stamp on it and mail it to me, you don't even need to wrap it.

* I've been testing Riak for a new project. Scaling from 1 to 10 threads, throughput grows by a factor of 12.5. I can't explain it, but I'm not going to complain.

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Sunday, February 05

My Life Is Now Complete

I just learned that there's a .இலங்கை TLD. I wonder if I can register mee.இலங்கை...

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Design Refresh

I'm doing a new design for the next version of Minx, based on the 960.gs / Skeleton / Bootstrap CSS layout libraries.*

The rounded corners are likely to go at this stage; form design will improve, and blogs will resize (at least in theory) to fit your device, but in discrete steps rather than one pixel at a time.

The idea is that you'll choose a 12- or 16-column layout, and then assign a certain number of columns to each element on the page, so you might choose 12 columns, and allocate 8 to the content and 4 to the sidebar. But you could also have a headlines area (between the banner and the content) with three items each four columns wide.

The new base widths will be 700 pixels (for smaller devices like tablets and phones), 940 pixels (for older PCs and notebooks), and 1180 pixels (for larger screens). All of those work out evenly whether you choose a 12- or 16-column grid.

There will be a pair of new, interactive menu bars above and below your banner image, the top one for the mee.nu system as a whole, the bottom one for your site. The current ads (which I haven't sold any of yet anyway) will shrink down to fit in the top menu bar, rather than sitting above it, and will expand out on mouseover. I think that's the best compromise to make them as unobtrusive as possible while still giving advertisers a useful amount of space.

Sample Images

Update: Damn arithmetic! One problem with the above layout is that to fit ads neatly in the sidebar you'd want it to be 240 pixels wide - the same as the ad itself. But the maths just doesn't work out.

With a 940-pixel standard layout, you have 12 columns each 60 pixels wide, and 11 margins in between each 20 pixels wide. 12 x 60 + 11 x 20 = 940.

With 16 columns, it's 16 x 40 + 15 x 20 = 940.

This works because we're ignoring the rightmost 20-pixel margin - if we included that, the widths would be 720, 960, and 1200 pixels - all multiples of 240, with lots and lots of useful factors.

So if you have a 3 column sidebar in a 12-column layout, that's 3 x 60 + 2 x 20 = 220px. 4 columns in 16-col layout is 4 x 40 + 3 x 20 = 220px. Either way, too narrow for the ad. 4 columns in 12-col layout is 4 x 60 + 3 x 20 = 300px; 5 columns in 16-col layout is 5 x 40 + 3 x 20 = 280px, which leaves a fair chunk of space over.

I'm not sure how bad that will be in a live design, so I'm not going to tear up the fundamental principles of mathematics just yet. And you could force the sidebar into a 240-pixel layout within a 280/300 pixel division if need be, with a larger than normal gap between the sidebar and the main content.

Real-world testing is indicated here.

* Most likely Bootstrap; I had some issues with version 1.4, but the newly released 2.0 cleans up most of the things I didn't like and adds even more features.

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Saturday, February 04

Some Other Days

Just bought a license for Highcharts to integrate with Minx. It's slick and polished and reasonably priced and the fine print in the license says:

Allow Highcharts to be used with an unlimited number of SaaS projects, web applications, intranets, and websites for you or your customers.

That's what I like to see - and exactly what Fontspring and Fonts.com prohibit.

So Highcharts gets my money and Fontsploosh do not.

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Overprovisioning, Part 1

I just counted. When the new systems arrive, I'll have 81TB of (working) raw disk.

20TB of that is currently sitting around because I haven't had time to install it. 21TB has been used for backups (two full sets) because things keep falling over. 24TB has yet to arrive.

Maybe I overdid things just a little.

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Restoring The Global Economy

Nagi (my Windows 7 desktop machine) has been playing up increasingly often of late, and in the past month went from occasional freezes to full-blown BSODs. I think it's due to one of the drives being on its way out; last weekend I backed up the entire system and took everything off that drive, and it hasn't crashed outright since then, though it did semi-freeze once overnight. (It was still up and running the next morning, but uninclined to do anything useful.)

I had originally planned to rebuild or replace Nagi on the cheap during my Christmas break, but in the end I didn't get a Christmas break; I ended up working the entire time. So no time for cheap rebuilds, but I got paid for two weeks I expected not to get paid for, so that money went straight into my toy fund.

And so, let me introduce Shana and Lina, who haven't actually arrived as yet, but have been ordered. Shana is my new Windows box, replacing Nagi; Lina is my new Linux box, replacing Tanarotte.

Base Config

AMD FX 8150 CPU (8 cores, 3.6GHz)
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 motherboard
32GB (4 x 8GB) G.Skill DDR3-1600 memory
6 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 2TB disks (2 in RAID-1, 4 in RAID-5)
Pioneer 12x Blu-Ray Writer
Corsair AX-850 (Shana) or AX-750 (Lina) power supply

Shana Extras

Sapphire 7950 OC Edition 3GB GDDR5 video card
Asus Xonar D2X sound card

Lina Extras

Sapphire 6770 1GB GDDR5 video card
Intel 320-series 300GB SSD

The two systems work out to almost the same price - the SSD is within a couple of bucks of the 7950 video card, but the 6770 is a bit cheaper than the fancy sound card.

So my Windows box goes from a 4-core 2.4GHz CPU to an 8-core 3.6GHz; from 8GB RAM to 32GB; from 1TFLOPS and 1GB of graphics to 3TFLOPS and 3GB; and from 4.5TB of flaky unRAIDed disks to 8TB of hopefully unflaky and definitely RAIDed disk.

Tanarotte is newer than Nagi, so the jump isn't as great, but it's still 4-core 3GHz to 8-core 3.6, 8GB RAM to 32GB, 5TB RAID-5 to 2TB RAID-1 plus 6TB RAID-5 - and another 300GB of SSD - and from motherboard graphics to a 1.36TFLOP 1GB dedicated card.

Whee!

Oh, and I still have the parts I'd set aside for rebuilding Nagi, so once the two new machines are settled in, I'll go ahead and do that as well.

Yes, this was pretty expensive, but Tanarotte dates to 2009 and Nagi to 2008 - I don't do this all that often.

Interesting point: Either of the new machines is more powerful than Aoi, the server that runs all of mu.nu and mee.nu. I'll need to do something about that next.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, February 03

Other Days

See that post below? Strike that. Reverse it.

Fontspring? Lovely site, beautifully organised. You can get nice, reasonably-priced bundles of fonts for both desktop and web use for "Unlimited Web Sites".

But the fine print says that you can only use the fonts on sites under your direct control, so I can't license them and offer them to mee.nu users.

Fonts.com? Not sure about the restrictions, but I checked the numbers again and realised that if a site like Ace of Spades were to use typography features licensed through Fonts.com, it would cost me $200 a month just for fonts, just for that one blog.*

So... Eeeeeh. Does Not Suck awards revoked. Both sites provide good, useful, reasonably priced services - just not ones I can make any direct use of.

Instead I'll mention Google Web Fonts, now up to 436 freely available fonts which I have conveniently integrated into the upcoming revision of the editor.**

The range of fonts isn't as broad, and the quality isn't as consistent (though some are quite good), but it doesn't tie my hands and prevent me from using it through licensing restrictions or simple cost.

And you can download the entire collection if you want. You'll need a Mercurial client like TortoiseHG, but if you're a programmer you should be using Mercurial anyway.****

* Admittedly, it's my single busiest site by a good margin, but...

** Well, I bought the editor, and it already had Google Web Font support.***

*** Well, I got the editor for free, but...

**** Git boo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 260 words, total size 2 kb.

Some Days

Some days I have a problem, and I spend hour after hour looking for a solution that doesn't bring more trouble than the problem itself, growing ever more frustrated until I want to kick the whole project to the kerb and take up potato farming.

Other days I find a solution that kind of works, then another solution that's better, and then another solution that's better still, in the space of an hour.

Today has been one of those other days. They come rarely, but all the more satisfying for that.

Fontspring and Fonts.com share today's Does Not Suck award for reasonable pricing and no-nonsense licenses.

Update: Or not.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:25 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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