Well that's good. Fantastic. That gives us 20 minutes to save the world and I've got a post office. And it's shut!
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.
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...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:20 AM
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
A good example is
OpenTTD, an open-source version of the classic
Transport Tycoon Deluxe. (All the "
X Tycoon" games came about because of TTD's success.) OpenTTD has quite a few improvements over the original, but you can turn them off and play it just like the classic TTD if you choose.
Posted by: Boviate at Sunday, February 19 2012 08:53 AM (63JPq)
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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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!)
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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, February 09 2012 06:02 AM (+rSRq)
2
Yes, I gave up wishing and am writing my own.
PS: after the Preview the form lost the Name/Mail contents, so had to re-enter them in order to Post.
Posted by: ad at Thursday, February 16 2012 10:08 AM (hGCqM)
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Sunday, February 05
My Life Is Now Complete
I just learned that there's a .இலஙà¯à®•à¯ˆ TLD. I wonder if I can register mee.இலஙà¯à®•à¯ˆ...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
Well, ain't that the cleverest thing to come down the pike since Issac Newton wanted an apple...
Posted by: Wonderduck at Sunday, February 05 2012 12:47 PM (DxepM)
2
Is there any chance that the full range of formatting options will be made available below the fold as well as above it?
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sunday, February 05 2012 05:20 PM (EJaOX)
3
Yep. In fact, you can do that now, it's just fiddly.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, February 05 2012 05:52 PM (PiXy!)
4
As long as the old 533-pixel-wide text is still supported, it's all good for me.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tuesday, February 07 2012 06:30 AM (G2mwb)
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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.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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