By sheer luck, I read a message someone wrote about dreamhost.com. They are a hosting company who is celebrating their 7th birthday with a crazy sale. The first 777 people to sign up for their crazy domain insane hosting plan can get it for $0.77 a month! I signed up for it a few minutes after checking out the details. It also came with a free domain, I chose sproutpics.com.

So far it's been great. Sproutpics is now running with a simple gallery program I threw together. It's got some pictures I took with my new camera. I have 800 megs of space to play with on there. And I can host up to 3 domains there.

Dreamhost is a cool community oriented hosting company. They have forums, and you can suggest stuff for them to add to their hosting packages. You can vote on what new stuff you want them to add, and they pick favorite hosted sites of the month.

Despite how great I think this all is, I still haven't convinced anyone I know to get their own account. A 4 pack of rechargable Energizer batteries costs more than it cost me to run this new website for the next year.

I just placed an order for a Canon PowerShot S1 IS digital camera. I did some extensive research and settled on this one, mostly for its 10x zoom lens with image stabilization. It also has a movie mode, which will come in handy. I also ordered a 1 GB Sandisk Ultra II compact flash card. These are supposed to write a lot faster than the normal CF cards, so I figured it was worth the extra $20.

When I get my camera, I'm going to go get a Rayovac 15 minute battery charger with it's special NiMH batteries. They can recharge 1000 times, so I might be able to take half a million pictures on one set of batteries. Gotta love technology.

Anyway, in a couple days I will hopefully get my camera and I'll post some pictures I take with it.

The government is phasing out cloverleaf interchanges. They start to slow down when traffic surpasses 1000 vehicles per hour.

Yahoo News

slashdot.org
has posted that Windows Longhorn will be skinable. They are also replacing BMP files for PNG, and this brings up the issue of broken transparency for PNGs in Internet Explorer. Maybe they will finally fix that after 5 years or so of their limited support of PNG.

Oops needed to change my image resize code...

rtre is the most comprehensive interactive rendering solution available for professional 3ds max users, students, and academic institutions. rtre is already in use by some of the World's leading commercial groups including Foster & Partners, ASDA/Wal*Mart, Helmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (HOK), Corus, British Airports Authority (BAA), SAS, Jarvis, RMJM, Parkman, Telenor Expo, The Jerde Partnership and Toxic Design Studio to name a few.



rtre is a suite of plug-ins and stand-alone tools that enables integrated real time rendering of very complex 3D scenes. Specifically designed to accommodate the complexity of realistic architectural models and game level design conceptualizations, rtre uses Cubicspace’s own highly sophisticated and advanced rendering engine to deliver a massive performance increase over existing technology. It is able to render millions of polygons in fractions of a second rather than the standard minutes or hours, letting users navigate their most complex scenes smoothly and freely at 30 frames per second. Scene data may also be output as images, video or published into freely distributable interactive scenes requiring no separate client viewer.



“rtre absolutely delivers when it comes to speed and reliable output right inside the 3ds max interface,” states Beau Perschall, Vice President of Publishing at Turbo Squid. “It is amazing to be able to move through highly complex environments in real-time! I’m excited about the technology that Cubicspace brings to the DCP program and what it’s going to mean for the design/visualization and game creation fields. It’s a product that must be seen to be believed.”



“Having an industry proven technology like rtre in the DCP program further validates the goals of our partnership with Turbo Squid and our commitment to the 3ds max community,” noted Chris Ford, Director of Product Management - Animation Products, Discreet. “Whenever you can tell users that you’ve gotten a tool that was rated 10 out of 10 then it’s a win for everyone. We’re thrilled that Cubicspace is part of the program.”

Yay :) PHP 5 beta 4 is out. I love PHP. [php.net]

today's snippet:

/* Database Stuff, do not modify below this line */

$c
or die ("Couldn't connect to server.");

$db = mysql_select_db("$database_name", $connection)
or die("Couldn't select database.");

If you are interested in web development you should go to chami.com and check out HTML Kit, I use it a lot to edit this site. It is very useful. :-S