This wouldn't have happened with Gainsborough or one of those proper painters.

Two-Edged Sword Of The Day

Is CPanel's auto-updater.  Unlike Microsoft's evil incarnation of this idea, it doesn't take out your entire computer.  What it did do - in this instance, the first time in the four years I've been running it - was get stuck in the middle of an update and leave phpMyAdmin mysteriously broken.

Killed the stuck update, forced a new update, and it was fixed.  After an hour wasted trying ever sensible option...

So if your mee.nu site bobbled briefly today, well, that was me.

Update: And if your mu.nu site exploded into tiny flaming pieces today, well, that was me too.  Adding one small PHP module turned into three hours of hell, thanks very much to CPanel.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:01 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Just As An Aside

GMail's magic URL parser doesn't recognise the CC TLD's for Saint Helena or Montenegro as being, well, CC TLD's.

But it does recognise the CC TLD's for Ascension Island and the British Indian Ocean Territory.

You may ask me how I know this.  My answer may have something to do with plans for mee-related world domination.  Also, bitterness at having missed out on Tuvalu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Global Warming Come Home!

All is forgiven!

It's 13C here in Sydney.

Indoors.

With the heater on.

I think I need to fire up my old PCs again.  At least they kept my toes warm.  These new energy efficient models suck in Winter.

Update: Back to normal Sydney Winter weather today, i.e. short sleeves and air conditioning, with intermittent showers of religious fruitcakes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:34 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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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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Green Ring Of Death

After my Compaq Presario notebook coughed and died just weeks out of warranty, I went out and got a shiny new HP Pavilion notebook to replace it.  Which is basically the same thing, except shinier and newer.

One of the shiny new features was that it has a proper dedicated Nvidia 8400 graphics controller, instead of the embedded ATI graphics on the Presario.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:28 PM | Comments (2) | 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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There'd Better Be Money In The Baptism Business

Because I'm about to pay $1500 for a font.

Licensing professional typefaces for web use is seriously expensive.  Well, seriously expensive to someone who's paying for it out of his own pocket, anyway.

What this means is that I can dynamically generate menu items and logo buttons and suchlike in the standard mu.nu font, Horatio Medium.  As things stand, I have over 100,000 pre-generated images for the menu items alone, and I have to manually generate banners if I want them to use this font.

It's a nice font, though.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:00 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Only Thing More Screwed Up

Than Windows XP's networking is Windows Vista's networking, which at this point I deeply desire to punch in the face.

It's the usual Microsoft problem, of course: A dumbed-down user interface over what is actually a fairly powerful system, such that when you need to do something unusual, or something has gone wrong, you can't, because while the system is perfectly capable of doing what you need, the user interface designers didn't think of that.

So I somehow got myself into a situation where I couldn't disconnect from a VPN because my computer insisted that said VPN didn't exist - at the same time that it showed that I was connected to that VPN.

Disabling all network interfaces solved that problem.  Of course, if you do that, it forgets what your network is called.  I mean, no-one would ever want their computer to actually remember something trivial like that, right?

Also, once you've disabled the interface, that only half-registers in the user interface, so you can't enable it again.  You can disable it again, if you wish, though I hardly see the point.  You can also ask the system to diagnose your network problems, at which point it will highlight to you the fact that your network interface is disabled, and offer to enable it for you...  Secure in the comfortable knowledge that you can't punch a piece of software.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 PM | Comments (2) | 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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