Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

Font Set One Is In The Air!

The first (of two) starter font sets for the theme builder is ready.  I hope to finish the second set today, and then finish coding the theme builder itself.

Samples are in the extended entry. This might take a while to load - it's about 3MB in 152 files.  (Update: Oops, they were 32-bit images.  Squished down to 8-bits now, so it's only about 1MB.)

As I mentioned before, these are all the work of the lovely and talented and all-round nice guy Nick Curtis.  Set two will highlight another font designer, Manfred Klein.*

* Assuming Manfred is okay with this.  I've emailed him about the project and hope to hear back soon.  Unfortunately, another designer whose work I very much like, Derek Vogelpohl, has disappeared from the net and can't be contacted.  Derek's fonts are under a mixture of freeware and non-commercial-only licenses, so I'm hesitant to use any of them without his consent.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It Takes An Image

Well, I've uploaded Minx 1.0, so it's time I started playing with some of the new features. Let's see:

Automatic Server-Side Image Scaling and Thumbnails (ASSIST!)

Shrink to 200 pixels wide - side-by-side with a browser-scaled image for comparison:
[thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg size=200x]

Shrink to 200 pixels tall:
[thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg size=x200]


Fit inside a box 100 pixels square, keeping proportions:
[thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg size=100x100]



Resize to 100 pixels square, regardless of proportions:
[thumbnail=/images/Benten.jpg resize=100x100]


Accessing this directly from HTML:

<img src="/images/Benten.jpg?size=200x" border="0" />


This is intended to make it easy to produce image galleries and photo albums where you need to produce images in multiple resolutions. Also, it will be used for user avatars: Since mee.nu users have complete control over their site layouts, there won't be a single fixed size for avatars, and resizing in the browser produces ugly images.

The advantages (apart from the improved quality) are that it makes it very easy to keep the image proportions, and it produces smaller files for fast loading times. (And less strain on your bandwidth.) Doing high-quality image processing is fairly CPU intensive, but we already have 16 CPUs at our disposal, so that is not anticipated to be a problem.

One hitch: This doesn't work for animated GIFs. Neither does the image processing function in the file module; the GIF library I'm using is lacking in several respects.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:07 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Finest Expression Of The Visual Arts

Brickmuppet is off on active duty (Coast Guard), but has left us with this fine bit of pinup art in his absence.  Seeing it stirred an ancient (in web time) memory, and I followed the link to the artist's page (some NSFW), and there she was:




Benten from Urusei Yatsura, looking just fine.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:35 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Blog Wars Episode 4: A New Look

The new mee.nu site design is up.  Let me know what you think!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:32 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Testing File Upload Thingy

Let's see if this works.

Upload...
Drag...
Drop...



Boobies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:32 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Things I Learned From Stargate

• Planets are small things, rarely supporting more than a handful of villages.


• The two most dangerous professions in the galaxy are Space Marine and Senior Medical Officer.


• All pre-industrial civilisations are blissed-out hippies.


• All post-industrial civilisations are stupid.


• All industrial civilisations are psychotic.


• You can get away with anything if you can plausibly lay the blame on a parallel universe.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:34 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Other Magical Harry

Caught the first two episodes of The Dresden Files today. If you haven't heard of this, and you like urban fantasy, you should check out author Jim Butcher's site and then take a look in your favourite bookstore.

Anyway, the show: It's good. It's not a direct adaptation of the books, at least not so far; there are hints that some later episodes will be closer to the source material.* Also, there are changes: Harry's apartment is aboveground; the Blue Beetle has been replaced by a Korean War era Jeep (which is fine; the reason Harry drives the Beetle in the books works just as well for a Jeep, and a Jeep would make some of the scenes in the books work better); Murphy is brunette; and Bob has gone all Quantum Leap on us.**

None of these present a major problem, and Paul Blackthorne makes a great Harry Dresden. He's not quite how I pictured Harry... or wasn't, until I saw him playing the part. Valerie Cruz isn't Murphy, but I think she'll make an acceptable not-Murphy. Terrence Man isn't quite Bob either, but given the changes that they needed to make to Bob for TV, I think he'll do fine. Conrad Coates as Morgan hasn't shown up yet, though it's a good sign that they list him as a major character.

Overall, a strong thumbs up from me. SciFi have put the whole first episode online so you can take a look.

* From this page, episode 6 is titled The Storm Front; Storm Front is the first book in the series.

** You'll know what I mean when you see the first episode. You'll say "Who the heck is that?!" That's Bob. "Oh... He's gone all Quantum Leap on us!" It works okay though, and book-style Bob would have been tricky to bring across to TV.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:43 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Keen Sense Of... Something

From a review of Stephen Baxter's Omegatropic:

As a critic, Baxter pulls no punches. His comments about others' work on similar themes to his own books (future history and space opera, etc) are often strident but also highly perceptive. Unsurprisingly, it is American writers that are the main targets of Baxter's incisive analysis. He's justly intolerant of implausibility in both plot development and character motivation, and derides US authors for their lack of any sense of irony. Baxter seems to suggest that this last bit of typically British sensibility is an essential part of any SF writer's mindset, irrespective of their nationality. This is not to say that Baxter slams optimism, only that American blue-sky thinking ought to be tempered with an awareness and deep consideration of the alternatives.

Riiiight.

I've just read Baxter's Timelike Infinity and Ring, the second and fourth books of his Xeelee sequence. The first, Raft, is out of print (or nearly so); the third, Flux, I bounced off after two pages.

With the small size of my sample set noted, it must also be noted that the plots of the two books I have read, and indeed the overall plot arc of the Xeelee sequence (which is outlined in those two books), is only possible if the great majority of Baxter's characters, and indeed of all sentient life-forms in his universe, are either brain-damaged or insane.

They build a starship to go on a five million light-year cruise, dragging one end of a wormhole with it, and their primary concern is the stability of the society on the ship during the cruise. The ship is churning across five million light-years of space at a velocity so great that only a thousand years will pass on board (and that includes deceleration and the return voyage!) and they are worried about social interactions. Medical techniques have advanced to the point that at least two of the original crew survive the journey; computer technology has advanced to the point that human minds can be (and are) uploaded into machines and so are effectively immortal, and they can't keep a starship crew functional for a thousand years. One of the characters is five million years old, and they can't...

And then they drop the wormhole and break it.

They have time travel. They have working time travel. In both directions. They've actually used it. And they still can't get anything right.

And while this is going on, the human race takes over the galaxy, gets wiped out by the race that controls the rest of the universe, which is then destroyed (for a rather dubious value of destroyed) by something even the humans have known about for five million years (and which has been around for twenty billion years, and just happens to crop up now), and apparently no-one involved ever bothers to talk to anyone else.

The astrophysics are complete baloney too. If you artificially cool the hydrogen core of a main-sequence star so that fusion ceases and it collapses under its own gravity, you might very well get helium fusion in the surrounding layers and something that resembles a regular red giant. But the hydrogen core is still there, even if it's collapsed into degenerate matter, and if you ever remove the artificial cooling you'll have an instant supernova.

And, and, and, red dwarfs are among the most useful stellar objects for a species planning seriously for the long term. A small red dwarf can keep up hydrogen fusion for a trillion years or more, a long time even to the Xeelee. And they're everywhere. Space is littered with the blasted things. Oh noes, we have no yellow stars, we are done for! What crap.

All of which criticism would not be nearly so mordant, if it were not for that one sentence from that review:

He's justly intolerant of implausibility in both plot development and character motivation, and derides US authors for their lack of any sense of irony.

Yeah, well, Baxter certainly has a keen sense of... something.

P.S. American blue-sky thinking ought to be tempered with an awareness and deep consideration of the alternatives. Yeah. Baxter's characters manage to commit suicide on behalf of not just the human race, but almost all life in the galaxy, through wilful and persistent stupidity. Mr Baxter, I have given deep consideration to your alternatives, and they suck.

P.P.S. I'm off to watch Sumomomo Momomo. Add half an eye-sparkle to my earlier review. It's no classic, but it's silly and fun.

P.P.P.S. That line about "American blue-sky thinking" still has me steamed. But having not read the book in question, I don't know how well it represents what Baxter actually wrote - it could well be something the reviewer read into it rather than something that is actually there - so I'll lay off awaiting further data.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:27 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy Goes To The Movies

I went and saw Howl's Moving Castle today. That makes four movies I've seen (at the cinema) in the past month; more usually I'm likely to see one or two in a year.

It also makes four out of five of the current movies that I want to see -

Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-rabbit
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Serenity
Howl's Moving Castle
Corpse Bride

Only the last remains, because it doesn't open here until next week.

Howl's Moving Castle is a great (but flawed) movie by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbour Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso...). Rotten Tomatoes gives it 84%, which as far as I can see is the worst rating they have given to any Miyazaki film.

I'm planning to put up a review of all five movies at some point, so for now I'll just note that if you enjoy animated films or fantasy stories at all, this is a must see while it's on the big screen. But as I noted (and unlike most of Miyazaki's previous work) there are a couple of rough edges.

I can't say for certain whether these crept in during translation (possible for one of the problems), are present in the original novel by Diana Wynne Jones (most of Miyazaki's films are from stories of his own creation), or are Miyazaki's fault. I'll be seeking out the book tomorrow, so I'll be able to clear that one up at least.

As to what the rough edges are... Well, wait for the review.

Ah. Okay. From one of the reviews on Amazon:

Diana Wynne Jones is much more subtle with her lessons in the book than Miyazaki is in the movie so don't expect the "war is bad" and "love is good" lessons to be thrown in your face. In fact, there isn't even a war in the book! That was something that was added in the jump from page to screen.

Yes, that was the worst of the rough edges. Sure, war is bad and love is good, but before now Miyazaki has been able to communicate this without, well, throwing it in your face. Now I must buy the book.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:45 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Trading Places

If George Romero and Cubby Broccoli had been switched at birth*

Dr. Dead
From Russia with Death
Deadfinger
Deadball
You Only Die Twice
On Her Late Majesty's Secret Service
Diemonds Are Forever
Die and Let Die
The Zombie with the Golden Gun
The Spy Who Killed Me
Graveraker
For Dead Eyes Only
Deadpussy
A View to a Corpse
The Dying Daylights
Zombeye
Tomorrow Dies
The Afterworld Is Not Enough
Die Yet Another Day
Never Say Nevermore Again

* Tricky since they were born thirty years apart...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:22 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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