What is that?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
It's a duck pond.
Why aren't there any ducks?
I don't know. There's never any ducks.
Then how do you know it's a duck pond?
Thursday, April 12
GamesGet
I regularly buy games on Steam and GOG, and I'm ashamed to say I've even bought a game on Origin, but I've only used GamersGate a couple of times, for things that were either drastically cheaper that way or that I couldn't find elsewhere.
I regularly buy games on Steam and GOG, and I'm ashamed to say I've even bought a game on Origin, but I've only used GamersGate a couple of times, for things that were either drastically cheaper that way or that I couldn't find elsewhere.
I just changed that in a significant way: I bought the 1C pack, the IndieFort bundle, and A-Train 9. About 100 games in total for less than $60.
It's a very mixed bag, but the 1C pack offers more than 80 games for $20, including the well regarded King's Bounty, Men of War, and Space Rangers series. Along with what I'm sure are some real stinkers, but given that the first King's Bounty game alone would set you back $15 on Steam, $5 for another 80 games is pretty amazing value.
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07:42 PM
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Monday, April 09
Joisey?
Talking to the hosting company in New Jersey, and it looks like mee.nu might be migrating eastwards in the coming months. We have been there before, from late 2005 to 2006. As best as I can recall:
Talking to the hosting company in New Jersey, and it looks like mee.nu might be migrating eastwards in the coming months. We have been there before, from late 2005 to 2006. As best as I can recall:
2003 Miami
2004 Lansing, Michigan
2005 Houston
2006 New Jersey
2007-now Dallas
I'm looking for a suitable provider in San Francisco / San Jose to replicate services to the opposite coast, but our main hardware will likely be in New Jersey.
I've got the money to spend on this, but I wasn't eager to upgrade our current systems because it didn't feel like I was getting good value. With this move, we'd be getting more hardware for less money - or a lot more hardware for the same money - which will give me scope to roll out lots of goodies.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:36 PM
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Sunday, April 08
Squirrel!
CouchDB 1.2 is out.
CouchDB 1.2 is out.
I tried out 1.1 but ran into problems with database size and performance. There were new features in the pre-release code to address both of those - specifically, a native JSON library and built-in database compression - but it was such a pain trying to build it* that I gave up and went elsewhere.
But now I can just download it and throw it on a server (or indeed, my notebook) and give it a whirl. So I'll do that.
My attention is on MongoDB at the moment, but CouchDB has some nice features, such as its incredibly robust storage mechanism (it's practically indestructible; you can copy a database while it is being updated and just fire it up on a new server) and its incredibly flexible indexing (anything that you can define in a piece of Javascript code can be an index). And multi-master replication. The problems I ran into were (1) it was seriously slow at transferring large numbers of records, and (2) the database files were really, really huge. So an update that specifically tackles those problems is of considerable interest.
* Erlang with embedded Javascript. Eh.
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01:21 AM
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Saturday, April 07
Moth-Like Eating Suspected
It looks like something's been nibbling on one of my favourite shirts - there's little holes and tears all over one of the sleeves. It's such a nice colour and a lovely cotton/linen blend too, and I bet I won't be able to replace - [checks online] - well, I guess for $10 the moths can have that one; I've got two more on the way.
It looks like something's been nibbling on one of my favourite shirts - there's little holes and tears all over one of the sleeves. It's such a nice colour and a lovely cotton/linen blend too, and I bet I won't be able to replace - [checks online] - well, I guess for $10 the moths can have that one; I've got two more on the way.
Gotta love online clothes shopping.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:31 AM
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Friday, April 06
Comparison Shopping
I'm looking around at pricing on a newer, shinier server for the newer, shinier mee.nu I'm working on. The baseline config I'm using is this:
I'm looking around at pricing on a newer, shinier server for the newer, shinier mee.nu I'm working on. The baseline config I'm using is this:
- Dual Xeon E5-2620 (2 x 6 cores, 2GHz)
- 64GB RAM
- 2 x 2TB disks
- 2 x ~200GB SSDs
- Hardware RAID-1
- 10TB bandwidth on 100Mbps port
- Remote access over IPMI
Let's see what I get from five different vendors, taking list price off the website of each:
- $615/month (but only 160GB SSDs)
- $655/month (240GB SSDs)
- $698/month (256GB SSDs)
- $764/month (240GB SSDs)
- $2,979/month (200GB SSDs)
Guess who's the odd one out?
Update: Sent out a couple of emails, got a reply back from number 3 who kindly pointed me to their latest specials. I might be getting a smaller server with them to try things out, and if it all works well, get two more.
And when I say "smaller" I mean 16 CPUs and 32GB of RAM, which is one-third more of each than have at the moment. And then three of those. I expect we can get four times our current capacity for the same price.
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06:21 PM
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Someone Needs To Find The People
Who animated this, and throw money at them.
Who animated this, and throw money at them.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:20 PM
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Fallout!
Classic old-school postapocalyptic RPG, DRM-free, FREE.
Classic old-school postapocalyptic RPG, DRM-free, FREE.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:10 AM
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A-Train 9
Is apparently out in English by way of Germany, retitled for unknown but clearly stupid reasons The Train Giant: A-Train 9.
Is apparently out in English by way of Germany, retitled for unknown but clearly stupid reasons The Train Giant: A-Train 9.
The site that had those wonderful hi-res screenshots has since bit the dust, and they don't seem to be up anywhere any more. I have many of them squirreled away somewhere, though, and might upload them here if I can find them.
Available on Gamer's Gate for thirty bucks, and as far as I can tell, not for sale anywhere else at all. Which is nuts. If they got it on Steam they'd have ten times the sales. It's as if they didn't want to make money from this.
Hmm. GOG have just started selling not-so-old games, and they have an announcement scheduled in (checks time) two and a half hours. Fingers crossed!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:30 AM
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Wednesday, April 04
Greatest Turn-Based Tactical RPG Of The Day
It's getting that way, isn't it? And isn't it wonderful?
It's getting that way, isn't it? And isn't it wonderful?
Anyway, today it's Shadowrun, for PC, iOS thingies, and Android thingies. They've only got 1.5% 4.5% 58% 79% of funding so far - but then, the project launched about an hour two eleven sixteen hours ago.*
* I checked, and at the time I spotted it, it had been active for an hour and had raised nearly $4000. In the following hour, it's raised another $14,000, and is still accelerating.
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11:43 PM
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It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Easter
It's a beautiful spring day here at Pixy Central* and I'll have a seasonal refresh of the main site up this evening. But you, dear reader, get a sneak preview of the latest work from our wonderful Chelsea Rose:
* Actually, it's well into autumn down here, but we're having better weather this week than we did all summer, so I feel I can call it spring if I want to...
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04:10 PM
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