A dedicated reader sent in a pair of links that show another way to preserve copyright in images posted onilne.

What do you do when the worst happens? Do you make light of it? Do you keep quiet until the storm is almost over?¹ Or, do you post the honest truth, and go above and beyond — because your customers are your guests? That’s what 37Signals did today:

We’re very, very sorry for this interruption of service … While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we’ll get that taken care of.

1. Rackspace was quiet about this until hours later ↩

Scoble hits the nail on the head talking about Moguls, the serverless internet company:

How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virtualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

[stars: 3] Surf’s up. Despite mirroring the penguin theme from a number of recent movies, Surf’s up is a fresh, funny, surf film. I was especially impressed by the superbly executed mocumentary plot, the smart voice casting (Jeff Bridges as a surf maven), and the hip surf-punk soundtrack (I expected the standard over-played 60s tripe).

Just when I was starting to look for a replacement for Google Analytics, I noticed that Feedburner started doing site statistics. Their stats presentation is smart, and they do feed stuff too.

Joel on context switching. He’s right too, there are a balance of principles at work: developers need to stay focused to be productive, but businesses are smart to take care of their customers.

A few ways to scare off good devs. The short version: developers are smart, they’ll see your impositions and mis truths quickly.

Linux Magazine’s Tip of the Day archive, a large collection of smart ‘nix tips.

Joel’s group built Wasabi, and Google built their Java->web2.0 translator. Smart people generate code, when they can.

Today I was thinking about how to write a web app that draws comic bubbles. There are many parts and solutions to the problem. It’s one of those things that gets complex quickly, unless you’re willing to remove some of the harder features.

I need to spend some time thinking about compromise, as a perfect solution is unlikely given the tools available for web applications.

Some of the problems:

• Embedding special fonts
• Resizing irregular bubbles
• Adding/positioning bubble parts
• Positioning fonts based on irregular edges
• Clipping bubbles to strip edges
• How/where to render (client or server, svg, js, raster, etc.)

I can see a few different approaches. Each solves a few of the hard problems, and each has its own rough spots.

One approach would be to perform the rendering on the server side. Something like Inkscape could be pared down to run as a web service. Comics would be stored in SVG, but rendered to GIF/PNG to embed in the web pages. Comic authors would edit their strips using rich Javascript approximations (edit boxes over the rendered form), and readers would see the already-rendered strips. This allows for high quality rendering, for authors who wanted to go to press with their strips.

Another approach would live within the limitations of xhtml/css/javascript. Fonts would be limited, and all rendering would be done client-side. Features could be added to this as browsers matured, but would depend heavily on browser vendors and compatibility. This approach would initially limit things like clipping, available fonts, etc., but would likely be easier to build.

There are dozens of other approaches too. Flash or the canvas widget could be used, or something written in Java. Luckily I don’t have time to start today, so I’ll have to let my subconscious gnaw on it for a while.