I need aid soon, lest my hamster become an orphan.

It's Not An Addiction!

I was browsing around Kickstarter yesterday, looking for cool projects to throw money at, and there aren't actually all that many that excite me, having already tossed cashbombs in the direction of Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick reprint drive and Rob Balder's Efrworld motion comic project. One that did catch my eye, though, is The Adventures of the Salamander. It's a series of children's books based on a story the guy wrote when he was five, and recently found while going through stuff his mum had kept (as mums are wont to do). He's now a freelance artist and has illustrated a number of books, but this is the first time he's both written and illustrated something. [ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/251426047/the-adventures-of-the-salamander/widget/card.html ]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Signed, Sealed, And Soon To Be Delivered

I'm getting a complete signed collection of all seven volumes of the Order of the Stick from the OotS Reprint Drive on Kickstarter. [ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure/widget/card.html ]

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Bits

All the parts for Shana and Lina have now shipped, except for the black Lian-Li drive bay adaptors (convert one 5.25" bay to four 2.5" bays) which are expected late this month, and the Sapphire 7950, which is now in stock at the distributor and should arrive this week.  (Update: Shipped!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I Liked It So Much, I Bought The Source Code

I mentioned in my recent post on InnovaStudio's Live Editor that while it was a great improvement on the already good Innova Editor, it no longer came with source code, which was now an extra fifteen hundred smackers.  In fact, that was the only thing I didn't like about it.

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Luvin' It

Luvit is Node.js for a language that doesn't suck.

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Kickstartled

Given the runaway success of the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter drive, I wonder what it would cost to produce new games like the original X-Com, Master of Orion II, or Master of Magic, with exactly the same gameplay but higher resolution graphics.  

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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5 Accessories Every Man Should Carry

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:27 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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All I Want For Christmas...

Is a database with the structure support and low latency of Redis, the document support of MongoDB, the indexing of Lucene, the robust persistence and map/reduce views of CouchDB, the compact on-disk representation of Kyoto Cabinet, the datatype support of PostgreSQL, and the scalability of Riak.*

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:59 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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My Life Is Now Complete

I just learned that there's a .இலஙà¯à®•à¯ˆ TLD.  I wonder if I can register mee.இலஙà¯à®•à¯ˆ...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Design Refresh

I'm doing a new design for the next version of Minx, based on the 960.gs / Skeleton / Bootstrap CSS layout libraries.* Update: Damn arithmetic!  One problem with the above layout is that to fit ads neatly in the sidebar you'd want it to be 240 pixels wide - the same as the ad itself.  But the maths just doesn't work out. * Most likely Bootstrap; I had some issues with version 1.4, but the newly released 2.0 cleans up most of the things I didn't like and adds even more features.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:04 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Some Other Days

Just bought a license for Highcharts to integrate with Minx.  It's slick and polished and reasonably priced and the fine print in the license says: That's what I like to see - and exactly what Fontspring and Fonts.com prohibit.

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Overprovisioning, Part 1

I just counted.  When the new systems arrive, I'll have 81TB of (working) raw disk.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Restoring The Global Economy

Nagi (my Windows 7 desktop machine) has been playing up increasingly often of late, and in the past month went from occasional freezes to full-blown BSODs.  I think it's due to one of the drives being on its way out; last weekend I backed up the entire system and took everything off that drive, and it hasn't crashed outright since then, though it did semi-freeze once overnight.  (It was still up and running the next morning, but uninclined to do anything useful.)

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Other Days

See that post below?  Strike  that.  Reverse it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Some Days

Some days I have a problem, and I spend hour after hour looking for a solution that doesn't bring more trouble than the problem itself, growing ever more frustrated until I want to kick the whole project to the kerb and take up potato farming.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:25 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Now Is The Time At The Mee When We Dance

So to speak.

Alive and Brilliant

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/gWQS3mXUW1M ]

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In My World

Wikipedia:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:19 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It's Not Friday!!

Feels like Friday.

Tomorrow's a public holiday, and I've had a hell of a week so far, so my brain was already busy planning for the weekend (sleep, set up blogs).

Um, no, brain.  Not quite yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Fans Will Be Fans

Rich Burlew has been putting out the Order of the Stick on the web, for free, for 800+ pages now.

He's earned a degree of popularity in the process.

How much?

Well, he recently launched a pledge drive on Kickstarter to see if there was enough interest to reprint one of the out-of-print collected editions.

The pledge drive will run for 30 days; 3 days in, he's already doubled his target.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:54 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Rough With The Smooth

Rough: InnovaEditor, the standard editor we've been using on mee.nu since the beginning, has been end-of-lifed.

Smooth: It's being replaced by InnovaStudio's new Live Editor, which looks awesome.



Smoother: Existing customers get a free license for the new editor.

Rough: The new editor doesn't come with source code, where the old one did.

Rougher: A source code license is $1099.

Roughest: Which goes up to $1500 after Saturday.

Smoothest: They're already working on the features I need, so I don't need to buy the source code license.

InnovaStudio Live Editor and InnovaStudio tech support get the coveted doesn't suck award. Recommended. Just $70 for an unlimited site single developer license.

Updates after the jump.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Shrink-Wrap Licenses

Should be required by law to offer three options: Agree, Disagree, and TL;DR.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Indexes Indexes Everywhere

Oh yes, other thing: MongoDB has indexes.  And while they're not quite as flexible as CouchDB (which lets you do anything that can be produced by an idempotent function on the record) or Riak (which lets you do anything at all, consistent or not), MongoDB can do what I need, which is building an ordered compound index where one of the components is the elements of an array.


No.

MySQL can't do that (it doesn't have arrays, to start with).  PostgreSQL can't do that (it has arrays, and can index them, but can't build an ordered compound index where one component is an array).  CouchDB has no problem; Riak will do anything you like; MongoDB can do it, but you can't have two arrays in the index (which would be nice to have available, but isn't going to kill me).

The other database that I know can do it - and might be suitable for Minx - is OrientDB.  I'd like to take a look at that too.

But MongoDB, now that those issues have been fixed, is fast enough, flexible enough, and scalable enough.  Might not be perfect, but what is?*

* Well, Kimi ni Todoke, but apart from that?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:46 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Rinne No Lagrange

Genki girl meets super-science flying battle robot.

Thoughts:

The robot fights are formulaic, but the characters and the character designs work for me, as does the art style generally and the music, both op/ed and incidental.

It's nothing groundbreaking, but it has a beat and you can dance...  I mean, it's enjoyable enough so far.

Two and one half little fishies out of four.  Wan.

Now you see 'em...


Now you don't.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:44 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Mongo Revisited

When I first met MongoDB, I was unimpressed, because in my testing it very quickly died and lost all my data.  The proximate cause for this was that I was running it under OpenVZ, which will switfly kill any process that runs out of memory (which Mongo did).  The reason MongoDB ran out of memory is that... 

Well, it didn't, not really; MongoDB works by memory-mapping the entire database and treating it as a persistent data structure, relying on the operating system to provide the persistence layer.  One problem with that is that an inopportune event at an inopportune moment can leave you with a pile of unreadable crap where your database used to be.  And another problem is that OpenVZ treated it as having run out of memory and killed it...  Which meant that on my test bench server - which runs OpenVZ precisely so that I can test things - MongoDB could be consistently made to crash and corrupt itself on small but realistic workloads.


MongoDB standalone.  What's the worst that could happen?

Contrast that with CouchDB, the Redis AOF, or Riak's Bitcask, which are all append-only and pretty much bullet-proof: If the entire server crashes before it can write a record, well, you lost that record.  But short of going in manually and deleting files, that's the worst that can happen.

So the problem I had was that while MongoDB had the closest semantic fit of all databases I'd seen to what I was trying to achieve with Minx, handing your data to it was like handing your collection of Wedgwood china to an inebriated juggling troupe - it's only a question of when.  You could replicate, but then you'd have to make damned sure that the same problem didn't happen to both copies.  And running it on OpenVZ was like handing your collection of Wedgwood china to an inebriated juggling troupe - and then setting your house on fire.


MongoDB replicated.  All your eggs in two (four?) identical baskets?

MongoDB now has (has for two releases, actually) a journalling facility that will replay lost writes after a power/hardware/software failure. On the whole  I'd rather have a persistence mechanism that was  inherently safe than an unsafe mechanism with a bungee cord attached for when it inevitably runs into trouble.  But while diving off a perfectly serviceable bridge never struck me as a particularly bright idea in the first place, diving off a bridge while firmly attached to it with a bungee cord is rather less likely to end in tears and crocodiles.

Still, if you wanted to run MongoDB, you needed either full-stack virtualisation, a ton of memory, or a dedicated server.  For me, the obvious solution is to add a ton of memory and leave the rest of the architecture intact.  The problem with being hosted at SoftLayer is that while they offer great support and a great network, their pricing is not so great, and their memory pricing is abominable; a ton of memory costs about three tons of money.*

Apparently that's also now been fixed from the other end: The latest versions of OpenVZ (based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 branch) bring with them a feature labeled VSwap (virtual swap), which both simplifies and flexiblises memory management and keeps MongoDB under control without mandating either a fiscal or architectural arrow to the knee.


Hurrah!  MongoDB and OpenVZ!

But our current server is running on RHEL 5 - actually, I think it's CentOS 5, but basically the same thing - so that requires a reinstall.  And if we're going to do that, we'd want to build a new server, test it, and swap over once it's all working.  And if we're going to do that, we'd be best advised to wait for a hardware refresh, which didn't happen at all for mid-range Intel servers in 2011, and still won't happen for another couple of months.

Which means...  I'll play around with MongoDB a bit more, I think.

* I'm looking into alternatives if they don't smarten up their game, and quickly.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ancient Wisdom

A game for 2-6 players ages 7 and up.

You will need: One six-sided die.

Rules:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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