Waffle

Handy reference comparing the PNG compression capabilities of three graphics apps (bottom of page). Also an overview of commonly used tools for PNG compression.

There's still an amazing amount of FUD doing the rounds about PNG, which is unfortunate. I think the main issue now is that many artists get burned by PNG because they don't get the filesize savings they've been promised compared to GIF. The savings are there, it's just that there are so many "correct" ways to write a PNG that you can get a range of file sizes from far too large to ultra-lean. I once again recommend PNGout as a simple tool to reduce PNG file-sizes at the very last stage of image creation.

See also this short article comparing various tools.

Norman Geras reports that one of my favorite political blogs, Harry's Place, has vanished from the earth along with its host, Bloghouse, which must house a lot of blogs, because it has blog and house in the name. Eep!

This is a bit like the disappearance of Dave Winer's weblogging service a few weeks ago, only in this case the host's flesh-and-blood owner has also disappeared.

Norm says Harry

doesn't know if they have any chance of recovering the material but it looks very much as though they may have lost everything.

I'd help, but all I have is the RSS summaries of the past few weeks. No full posts on disk, alas.

(via Socialism in an Age of Waiting who are also sort of MIA, but that's only because they've decided to concentrate on the waiting and leave the socialism for a rainy day. And they heard the news from The Virtual Stoa. Yes we're learning to be thorough about our sourcing practices here at Waffle.)

Update: Of course, Archive.org has quite a bit of material.

Zombie Shelley is back!

Literally in the last hour, my sinuses started to clear up, my ears popped open, and the fog in my head started to lift somewhat. I'm still not feeling my best, but all I have to do now is wait for the bronchitis to come and go, and then I'll be right as rain.

I'll finish Wednesday's page tonight.

The always excellent Naked Maja counters the Observer's list of 100 best British records with a list of his own. The point of reading these lists, of course, is to go through them and test how good your taste is by checking off records that you actually own. By the Maja's standards, I'm doing appallingly badly, with only 4 records from his list in my collection. The Observer's list flatters my taste a little more, allowing me 7 matches, but on the other hand, that list has not just two Radiohead albums but two Oasis albums on it, which ought to tell you something about how seriously we should take that one.

So go on, go through these lists, and tell me how good your taste is. And if you'd care to guess which of those albums on either list appear in my collection, be my guest.

Yes, I'm a nerd about music. Shoot me.

I thought it was time to take the advice printed on recent EMI CDs, to go to musicfromemi.com and see where I could get me some legal MP3 (or other - I'm not picky) downloads in exchange for modest payment to compensate the artists. Because compensating the artists is a good thing.

If you go to MusicfromEMI, you get to pick a country from a map from which to download stuff. When you pick the Netherlands, you get a luxurious 4 options, all of which (eventually) take you to the same actual download site, which then tells you to stuff your shiny, new and secure edition of Opera and use something up-to-date like 3-years-old, leaky Internet Explorer 6 (actually, 5 or higher) instead. Because I like having control over the studio computer and don't even have IE on the home machine, that Won't Do.

I was, however, prepared to look further and download iTunes and use its music store. While installing, that, I was disappointed to see that it blocked other software from access to a user's iPod, but since nobody in the studio has an iPod, that was trivial. However, trying to acess the store and begin buying some titles (I had some specific ones in mind that I was looking for that are extortionately priced if you try to buy them on CD), I was confronted with this message:

Because, you know, this is the Netherlands. We all live in mudbrick huts here. We only co-patented the CD format and were only like the second fastest nation to adopt it in the 1980s, and more willing than any to pay through the nose for music. It's good policy to ignore a backward country like this one.

The only reason I had for installing iTunes in the first place was to be able to shop, so off the machine it goes.

Seriously, I want to be able to get with the times, do the buy-and-download thing and fill my computer with new music in an ethical and responsible manner. But somebody is going to have to provide me with the means to do so. And said means had better not suck.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my lack of interest in the Cartoonist's Choice Awards:

It may have something to do with the way it creates bad blood in the "Webcomics Community" (as if there is such a thing) each year. There's always a lot of criticism and when I take part I always end up weighing in. Bleah.

I didn't make this clear at the time, but when I said "criticism" I meant "bad-tempered bitching about the way the events are run, the people running it, and, eventually, their mothers." I don't have time for that, but I always end up wasting mental energy on it. So this year, I've maintained a polite disinterest in the awards.

Of course, webcomics creators being what they are (and I make no claim to being any better, honestly), bitchfests spring up where they can, and so it was only a matter of time before I'd read this (from Joey Manley's blog: )

A bit of a pissing match has broken out lately over the role of webcomics criticism, specifically since the launch of The Webcomics Examiner. I see three factions in this war. There are likely more.

I've read the whole thing and followed some of the links. As usual, it's not so much the blog/journal/forum postings themselves as the endless strings of comments that follow them that make me roll my eyes. The question that comes to mind is: With all the Webcomics tutorials available online, isn't there a "How to hold your breath and count to ten" tutorial?

And again, I make no claim whatsoever to being better than that. There's a reason I need to stay out of this sort of thing.

I really need to get a new font for ROCR when the current storyline is over. The Stripschrift font looks nice but I have to do so much manual correction that it's almost as time-consuming as lettering by hand.

I'm taking suggestions. No Blambot fonts, please, unless they come with a full collection of umlauts.

Continuing in "Heh, interesting", quick-link-and-blockquote mode until I'm feeling my cantankerous, nuance-free self again...

In a post from 2003, the wonderful Dsquared writes:

In English, the answer to the question "can you compose a haiku?" is basically the answer to the question "can you count?".... And yet there are still people in the world who believe themselves to be showing off their intelligence and even, ye Gods, sensitivity, by attempting to "compose" haiku extempore. I've seen it happen in real life as well as on the internet (obviously)and in Simpsons episodes about precocious kids. It's horrendous. The fact is that, unless you have decided to adopt some restriction of English metre or rhyme, the haiku is free verse, end of story. The intellectual effort needed to fit the seventeen syllables is equivalent to solving crossword puzzles in one dimension. It's much less intellectually challenging a form than the limerick, for example; damn few people can write a good one of those. How the hell did the haiku get so popular? I can only blame English teachers. Nobody, apart from a few freaks, Orientalists and other statistical anomalies, would have bothered with trying to import this form into English otherwise. Obviously, as with so many abstruse and foreign forms, Ezra Pound has to cop some of the blame for introducing the English speaking world to the bloody thing in the first place, but I find it rather difficult to believe that a single one of these 456 people has ever heard of him... [snip] If you're thinking of writing a haiku, don't do it.

His commenters then take the opportunity to torment him more, and one of them points him to an actual campaign against joke haiku:

(more...)

I seem to be coming down with a cold or 'flu. So far, I've only got the sore throat but it could get worse, and I've been stocking up on the 'flu survival materials (orange juice, licorice and soup) just in case.

I'm staying at home tonight. Monday's update is not in danger, but I'm not getting ahead and may need to skip Wednesday's to work on other, better-paid stuff. Also that longer article I promised about recent developments in webcomics may be delayed.