Certain people I know have challenges with photoshop. This guy named Donnie(real name?) has a surprisingly educating and hilarious set of videos on youtube with tutorials on how to use photoshop. I have watched most of them, they are all funny. Here is the latest one.
New Camera Canon A560
I got a new camera for a trip i’m taking this summer. It is a Canon A560. Overall I’m very pleased with it. I’m a big fan of the A series, I have owned an A60 for a few years now and it has been a good camera. The 560 has been pretty much everything I expected and more. Very easy to use and maintains the same basic control setup as the old A series. Turns on 2x as fast as my old one, holds 2 less batteries, 3x as large screen, 2.5x the megapixel. I look forward to using it some more! I was particularly impressed with the macro mode. I snapped a photo of a penny just playing around and was stunned how sharp it came out.
AspImage to ImageGlue conversion done
So after a good hard week of coding on my own time. I am happy to say our primary website at work has been converted from ASPimage over to Imageglue. Without going into specifics this is the core of the site, the image generation IS the site. After my intial post on the issue I had written a complete wrapper class in ASP to hopefully make the switch over in one line of code. Unfortunatly that was not possible since one particular function in imageglue was not terribly efficient. I was able to make one further refinement and bring the image generation time up to an acceptable point.
It has now been 2 days since the switch over and knock on wood thousands of images have been generated successfully under imageglue and the w3wp.exe has not crashed!
Next up a personal site of mine is in the same situation. However I was able to make my wrapper work with it on swapping only one line of code. I will be posting the wrapper shortly. It needs some commenting and general cleaned up a bit before I put it infront of the world.
Why budget webhosting sucks
It has been my experience when it comes to web-hosting you simply get what you pay for. This post comes on the heals of one of my ecommerce sites I started being down yet again today. The issues revolve around and around, seems like we rotate through them as the months go by. Email trouble this week, server disk full next week, random timeouts(hah, that one is normal), and sprinkle in the other odd one time issues and you get a picture what we go through. In my time with this particular host (about 8 months now) we have bit our toung and tried to give the guys the benefit of the doubt, but the last straw has finally come and we shall be switching. Who is the host? I’m not ready to say, because I get the impression they try to help, but it seems like the are just another budget host. See whenever I get a new host my expectations are always high, then with varying amounts of time my impression of them goes further down until finally I get fed up and switch. This has occurred enough times to me personally (and professionally) to simply lower my standards for these host. Now I will say the host I’m typing this post on is hostmonster.com. I can’t really complain about them, but I wouldn’t call hosting a blog mission critical either.
So what is the point of all this? Basically I’m complaining again about how crappy my current host is for my ecommerce site. What to do? When we started the site it was on a shoe string so we were looking to save where we could. Hosting was one place, now the site is definitely on it’s feet we are moving to a dedicated solution. So pony up a bit more for some decent hosting when you need the reliability.
Edit
Go figure, at the time of hitting the post button hostmonster went down for nearly 2 hours 0_0
futuremark trademarks pwnage
So futuremark thinks they can trademark the term “pwnage”. This has been floating around the net for a few days, but what I found funny was the followup (damage control) that they posted here.
Fellow gamers,
Our purpose in filing for trademark on the name “Pwnage” is not to charge money or stop people from using the expression. That’s not what a trademark is for. Instead, we want to protect ourselves from squatters (or what I call campers) – people looking to trademark the name on false pretenses, just to make a claim against Futuremark Games Studio for its use.
Jukka Mäkinen, Executive Producer, Futuremark Games Studio
In essence, Jukka has described that what they are attempting to do is exactly what they are trying to prevent.