Well, mostly! :)

The author (sytrix14) says he's used InstantShot! to grab images from iMovie and send them to MorphX:

Wonderful! :)

Substituting the Italian and the British flag on this site was badly needed. Our aesthetic taste was crying for justice.

And so be it. Tonight I found a wonderful "devkit" published by Bartelme Design. On the site you'll find flags for a lot of countries in the world and a PhotoShop and Illustrator kit to make one yourself.

Cool!

After a few days of work here comes online DigitalWaters 2.0.

Maybe you'll notice just some minor aesthetic changes to the left column, but I've also made a lot of changes to the PHP code behind the whole mess.

One important effect of the changes should be a generally faster site, since I've also added a caching mechanism largely based on an article by Jay Pipes.

To tell the truth everything started from the categories' cloud that I implemented after seeing it in some blog and that I was willing to try on this site to replace the plain list that was there before. Then I lost my grip on the whole situation… :)

Cheers to WebService. It's not free but at least we know that our faith in their capacities and honesty are well deserved.

As the interest for some of our projects rapidly grew some months ago, we had to move some of them to a new host with more bandwidth. We chose 110mb. No advertising, bandwidth and disk space in excess. It seemed like a dream. Even if the perceived uptime is slightly lower than the advertised 99.73%.

Until we received, after several quiet months, an email in our GMail spam folder, found by chance, that invited us to write at least 50 posts in the 110mb users' forum in two weeks or to pay a 10$ one-time fee to leave the MySQL account active. We decided to write the 50 posts. Today the db account is disabled. They say it will be reactivated in three days.

Meanwhile there's not even a way to put up a page that checks whether the DB can be accessed or not, to choose what content it should show to the user: as soon as you call the mysql_connect function, the script gets killed. The only solution has been to replace the dynamic page with a static one and check periodically when the db access comes back up to manually replace it back.

We are pretty sure that this sudden change of policy was necessary to filter the users and to curb the use of resources, probably gone through the roof far more than expected. On the other hand the service is good and what they offer "for free" seems far more than what everyone else does. And being able to say that your host supports (or soon will) Python, Perl and Ruby in addition to PHP sure is cool :). So for the time being we stay. With an idea to update the site, thinking about static content.

Until the next unwelcome surprise from 110mb.

PS: MySQL is back online as promised and so is our projects' site. Unfortunately I have to take back my word—they did it actually: they have enabled Python and Perl but they are available only after a one–time fee of 17$. I suppose they'll do just the same for Ruby too.

I've just released a new version of Offshoots (1.2) on our projects' site!

A new short movie of it:

Important changes in the new release of FastIcns, now at version 3.0. You'll find it on its page: DW.net Projects.