The ravens are looking a bit sluggish. Tell Malcolm they need new batteries.

Today's Toys

More toys for the expanding m(u|ee)nuvian empire:

• Just shy of 100,000 icons from glyFX, an Australian graphic design company.  Admittedly, that counts all sizes, formats, and colour variations, but it's still a lot of nice icons at a good price.  Now I just need to work out what to do with them...
• A new server, which will probably be called Sakura.  This is hosted at a different company* and doesn't have quite the power of Aoi and Midori, but it has lots of memory and disk space and is cheap.  It will be used for the random freebie hosting I do (distinct from mu.nu and mee.nu) to reduce the load on Midori, and for offsite backups to reduce the load on my ADSL.

Now I just have to chase down my Adobe CS3.3 update and my Eye Candy bundle** and I'll have everything.  Oh, and have to order the amCharts graphing module.  Can't forget that.

* But still in Dallas.  Nobody bomb Dallas!
** Eye Candy is on its way.  Again.  Apparently it got lost the first time and went back home...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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For The Terminally Insecure

- or those who simply forget from time to time who their blog belongs to - I just nabbed mee.me.

(I also have mee.fm, mee.gs, mee.im, mee.li, mee.ms, and mee.vg in case anyone wants to use those.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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New Doctor Who Season 4 Finale (No Spoilers)

Is very very good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:08 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Quoted For Coolth

Together WK2 and SS2 form the basis for Virgin Galactic's fleet of suborbital spaceplanes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ah, That's Better

Thank you trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS3.  The beach just wouldn't be the same without you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch

I bought 300 photo credits from BigStockPhoto today so that I could start gathering images for the Minx 1.2 theme library.  (I've already added 20 new standard themes, but now that I've found this resource, I plan to add many more.)

Then I realised that while the colour and composition were fine - I could tell that from the samples - I hadn't checked any of the images at a larger size for detail and artifacts.  Something you'd generally want to do before forking over $300.*

Fortunately, the level of detail is very good, and compression artifacts are barely noticeable even when you zoom in and hunt for them.  (In most cases, I can't see any artifacts at all.)  Since the images are going to be cropped and reduced anyway, the quality of the files is more than sufficient.

So look for some interesting new theme choices soon.

* If you spend $300, the photo credits are $1 each; if you spend less, they're between $1.40 and $2.50, so it make sense to buy in bulk if you intend to use a lot of photos.  Low-resolution photos (about 1 Mpixel) run 1 credit each, medium resolution (about 2 Mpixel) run to 2 credits.  I'm using the medium-res versions so that I get more flexibility in cropping and scaling - and because the end product can be up to 1000 pixels wide - so I get 150 photos for my money.  Which is great, because looking at other stock photo sources that allow use in web templates, the prices I saw ranged from $25 to $100 - and upwards - per photo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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We Interrupt This Rant

SofLayer have fixed their content delivery network.

I signed up (and have been paying for) this service the moment it was announced, because (a) it's cheap and (b) they have a very good distribution of nodes across North America, Europe, the nicer parts of Asia (Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong), and Australia.

Except their DNS was hosed, and I variously got routed to Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, or Tokyo, depending on the time of day and the humidity.

This made a potentially great product about 98% useless.

But now, they've fixed it.  When I look for the local node, I get the local node.  Which is right here in Sydney.  14ms away.

I have accounts for it for both mu.nu and mee.nu.  I'll be integrating it into the system over the next couple of months.  What it will mean is that without changing anything from the user's point of view, all your files will be automatically backed up all over the world (free 20-way redundancy!) and will show up much faster for people who don't already live in Texas.

Your file URLs may change, though.  Instead of myblog.mee.nu/images/boobies.jpg, it will get translationed into something like cdn.mee.nu/meenu/myblog/images/boobies.jpg.  The old URL will still work, but won't be able to take advantage of the CDN.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:34 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Most Common Super Power*








What?


* The Most Common Super Power

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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