Lolwtf?

20 Jun 2007

Sony Ericsson v630i camera-phone snap in low light… Photoshop redeemed it a little. Geek numberplates rock (as does the black-on-black Mitsubishi logo!).

Adam’s last week running Tackles

20 Jun 2007

I don’t have any good wedding photos (well, might do on the two miniDV tapes, but… you know) so nothing to share there. Mark and I are appreciating Adam even more now he’s gone gallivanting off on a honeymoon a few thousand kilometres from Paddington School. He’ll be back on and off throughout the year, which is definitely a good thing. The photos above are from his farewell inside the church, during which Warwick got myself and Mark up and tried to interview us without our prior knowledge (or, more accurately, being expressly told we wouldn’t be…) and accordingly managed to make complete asses of ourselves. It was one of those situations where you’re balancing between answering seriously and giving fluff responses because you don’t want to get too drawn into things (on account of this not being intended as an interview in the first place)… I ended up alluding to something we’re running in about September, and then neither of us could even remember when it was… a fantastic first impression. :/

All that aside, God was pretty good to us the first week we were on our own, despite a school fête being held simultaneously in the rooms we normally meet in! We’ve got a social coming up this Friday and the last week of term is on Sunday (but I’m bailing on account of not being able to do maths and consequently having said yes to a study camp that begins a little too early).

And yes, the sword did get passed on.

Why no, vector artwork is not universally superior for lines

18 Jun 2007

I’m cooking up a booklet for a study camp at the minute that has a simple grid-lines (ruled maths paper) background and initially traced it with Illustrator because it looked, err, linear enough to be a fair candidate for such work.

The trace had to be a little eclectic for realism’s sake, so I didn’t just do the redraw with Ctrl + D transform ninja skills, but let the software trace it. Big mistake.

It was one of those things that InDesign got a little upset about the complexity of — which is okay — and had to import as encapsulated postscript instead of as native vector data — which is also okay. Trouble was, it wasn’t just borderline too-complex, it was stupidly over the edge. I stuck it on the A-Master (which keeps me sane and the .indd filesize down) and got to work for about a week on the rest of the content and so forth. As we get closer to press (I was aiming for today… others apparnetly have different ideas) I’ve started doing the Indd->PDF shuffle and discovered the absolute pain of waiting for it to “render” (basically that’s what it’s doing) the EPS onto every page as it creates the PDF file.

I endured this for about two days and then finally snapped this morning, went back to Photoshop with the source image and processed it to make it look similar enough before pasting the raster scan into the A-Master in the traced thing’s place.

As if by magic, the generated PDF size dropped from 55MB to under 4MB.

Raster images are your friend.

p.s. hopefully I’m back here now. Am away next week with GPRS Internet only, then in New Zealand (with Internet, albeit with uncertainty about having a computer in the accommodation). Yes, busy as ever. On Facebook quite a lot, because status updates are more managable than full blog posts!

Too much nostalgia for a computer

28 May 2007

What follows is written far less well than it deserves, but — ironically — I’m drowning in other work at present. This needed writing sooner than other things did.

Michael‘s pulling the plug on the server that this website has run on since 2003.

The ‘server’ has changed dramatically in constitution since it all began way back when, but… wow. An astonishingly large part of my teenage years. For the longest time, it seemed as though the Internet had altogether ceased to exist everytime Dale’s connection went out. In the early days, we were all running servers on port 1200 to circumvent ISP restrictions on port 80. phpBB was the order of the day, running Apache — on a pirated copy of Windows 2000 (those were the days in which “legitmate software” constituted an oxymoron). Operating on an early ADSL link with 64kbps upload, forum emoticons were hosted on free web space provided by iiNet in order to conserve bandwidth. You laugh now, but the speed boost was incredible. Every time iiNet dropped out (to future readers: that’s what happens when the internet goes out for a couple of hours, none of this occasional connection time-out rubbish), an irate explanatory post from mwdmeyer would emerge and life would continue as normal. Until parents discovered the server running and turned it off again, which would spark an effort to conceal yet another computer in a room crowded full of equipment. About halfway through 2004, they gave up searching.

These were the days (for me) of NE2000 clones powering Smoothwall/m0n0wall routers, recycling hardware, a subscription to Atomic before all the other kids (I bought more geeky magazines than anyone I know–I think it was that strange meeting place of compters, creativity, and cant that I later became comfortable with), when GeForce 2′s and Pentium 4′s (the first ones with RDRAM that everyone despised) and DDR-supporting Athlons were still zippy. When frame-based redirects passed for domain names — .tk, anyone?

Mostly, it was about the forums… but as for personal publishing, this was no small resource. My first dynamic website was a blog hosted on that server — I don’t think it yet had a name — we all rolled our own web software in those days (it’s not that long ago). Some of us still do. The first domain name acquired was Dale’s, in March 2004, co-inciding (more or less) with the forums’ first birthday. Twelve US dollars later (Joker.com’s prices still haven’t changed), we were all still using frame-based redirects — static IPs were the stuff of pipe-dreams, and Dynamic DNS, though around, was outside of the experience of most of us. Steve ran a notoriously-flaky IIS server with real domains and Exchange, but paid about $150 a month for the privilege: static IPs being available only on business grade internet connections.

These are mere details. The forums themselves constitute an amazing chronicle of the lives of mwdmeyer, ucosty, Sammy, i_am_a_n00bie, Smile:), smKz, n

cktangents, angelicdeity, baibai, Sphinx^, ludvikas, and a handful of others over a fairly tumultuous time. There is so much not recorded explicitly that surrounds the nearly 16,000 messages from these eleven users alone. Some has been suppressed, other parts forgotten, but all of it inextricably linked together in the momentum of time. There are some things about that time which will never be shared with those who weren’t around.

The forums didn’t survive post-school. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of research that says this will be the case for any given relationships faced with that manner of transition, but it was still bizarre witnessing what would have been several months of time spent on a single website evaporate into (not much). The server moved from Balmain to Marian Street, eventually finding its way into a rack there. This is where things get hazy for me. I think the last time I saw Michael might’ve been New Years’ Eve 2005/2006… I feel some sense of guilt about that, but recognise mutual busy-ness had a role such that neither of us should be blamed alone. I don’t believe that a blameless “but things changed” is ever sufficient when talking about close relationships. I’m fairly certain my closest friend for about two years at school is someone that I no longer have anything to do with, but can’t explain why. And I know that I can’t in any way blame him, because I’m so guilty of failing to keep working on relationships myself.

I suppose the point of all this is that the computer formally known as ‘Metro’, now ‘Loki’ (I don’t know how it got that name — Loki to me is an amazing contributor to Linux-based gaming, 2000-2002 RIP, but it could just as easily have been named after the Norse trickster and Odin’s wily accomplice!) isn’t just the latest in a series of bits of electronic gear that some markup and pixels have been piped off for a couple of years. This is just one step closer to a complete closure of a very large chapter of my life… and, yeah, that’s incredibly sad.

Please don’t for a minute consider this to be my arguing that Loki should stay switched on — it’s about something far greater and more personal than a startlingly reliable FreeBSD web server that just happened to host a website for free for a long time.

There aren’t too many people you can make sit in the back of a car on their 18th birthday, much less who will laugh along with as it happens.

This isn’t an obituary, just a poor expression of remorse at the (human) disconnection and ‘drifted’ relationships of that era. Michael, once all this stupid uni crap gets out of the way (maybe after you move again?), I owe you a fairly large drink.

Thankyou.

Clarification: “Please don’t let it die :(“

28 May 2007

This blog isn’t vanishing off the face of the planet.

Quoth the concerned: “That’s like the only way I have of seeing how you are most of the time now!” — which makes me almost as depressed as I was after my nostalgia trip writing the last post, because ‘the concerned’ is someone who is also of fair significance to me. It’ll move, but not die.

I’ve got too many business cards with the address printed on it to let it die for another year or so ;-)

I spent a few hours today tracking down a good web host after evaluating DIY hosting and deciding it almost certainly wasn’t worth it, even with a static IP and remarkably stable ADSL2+ link (no, not just against 2003′s 256/64 PPPoE standards!). I’ll be switching this site across sometime in the next week or two, probably at some arcane time of day that no-one will notice anyway because that’s just how I roll. It’s funny, because I’ll now be using the same hosting my clients do… and I switched hosting providers to do so. Segpub were great for a few months, but they’re just a little too expensive and inflexible for what they are — an Aussie company doing good US hosting. New provider is A Small Orange, who have a positively yawn-inspiring website but get good press. I was so tempted by Site5 and Dreamhost’s absurd promises, but given none of this is going to come close to the reliability of web hosting on one server where the admin has an enormous vested interest in, it made sense to go with someone smaller and more sensible. That, and I wanted to be confident reselling it… now I might actually start making some money out of my handful of hosting clients… just.

Hosting for me is continually about keeping people around to help them out with support and preventing them from worrying about managing the component parts of their web services, more than any concerted effort to make money. Even if I were to take it more seriously (i.e. actually bill people on time, etc.) it would rarely amount to anything more than pocket money unless I really chased after a lot more clients than I care to single-handedly engage with… reselling hosting is only profitable if you outsource support to a bunch of geeky high school students with too much free time (that was me when I considered reselling to be even slightly lucrative!) — ideally high school students who have never had a real job!

The biggest thing I’ll miss technically? Having a relatively local SSH box (low latency) with relatively permissive security (ever tried running a text-mode browser on a Jailrooted terminal? BadTimesâ„¢). But that barely affects publishing so… nothing is dying.