Here's an example of how it looks:

It seems to work with vBulletin and phpBB from a quick few searches, quite cool knowing that Google goes into this sort of depth when returning results!

PNG alpha transparencies are something that most graphic designers long for on the web. The ability to overlay/fade something over a background, especially when it is dynamic content is amazingly useful. Drop shadows are probably the most requested, and while firefox, safari and IE7 support this behavior, IE6 simply doesn't do alpha transparencies at all (who would have guessed!).

There has been an interesting fix available for quite a while now from TwinHelix, which added support for IE6 using the AlphaImageLoader filter. This works great for a lot of situations, however it didn't support repeating backgrounds, which is something quite commonly requested (for borders and frames).

The same people who released the first fix, now have an alpha version of a small javascript include, which adds support for repeating backgrounds.

While adding these fixes does add a little more filesize, it can sometimes be a necessary evil to serve an extra 5-10kb of files to IE6 - in 2008, that is not a particularly large price to pay.

I know I will be starting to think a bit more about including some alpha transparencies in my designs now I know a viable solution is out there.

The advantage of being able to stop the lens so low, is that you can shoot in quite low light conditions, although the depth of field also gets a lot narrower at the same time. This makes it great for portrait photos, food photography, or anything where you're trying to really highlight something, but not have the background distracting attention.

When taking photos of people, the "bokeh" behind them is something that this lens really is good at creating.

Can very much recommend this lens, I've uploaded an example photo here (which was taken in very low light) and I shall hopefully have a lot more to come!

RAID 1 is a mirrored drive setup, I have 2x 1tb drives in my server, which both contain the exact same data, and act as a single 1tb drive. In the event of one drive failing, I can simply put a new one in, let the background process rebuild the new drive, and there should be zero downtime.

There are several methods to go down to get your RAID setup. The first is by using on-board RAID found on many motherboards, however this relies on a driver to get things up and running, and if your motherboard was to be replaced or break, you would have to find another with the same chipset to get things running again, I didn't like this idea.

A dedicated RAID card is the other option, although you have to be very careful, as many of these cards simply are a virtual interface for a drive built into your operating system, that covers any card you see advertised for $80-$200.

The full hardware solution cards are the best of the best, but they do come at a price, $400-$500+. Simply put, the full hardware cards have a dedicated processor on-board which manages everything, all the operating system sees is a regular drive. The benefit of this is that you get the fastest speed possible, and more advanced setups like RAID 5 work far better.

To throw a spanner in the works however, linux has an inbuilt software RAID which works on pretty much any *nix distro. It's called mdadm, and has the advantage of being able to manage a RAID setup without having to use BIOS drivers or proprietary bits sitting in between.

Because i was after data reliability over speed, I chose to use this method, as it is quite portable between systems, doesn't require custom formats and is so, so easy to setup.

Make sure you have all of your data backed up before attempting this, it worked fine for me, but it's always better to be safe. I'll make the point at this stage, RAID is not a replacement for good backups, so don't get lazy. ;)

From Sébastien Wains, the easiest way to setup a system is to use the "missing" method. I was dealing with a SATA drive that already had data on it (/dev/sda1), and my new, blank drive (/dev/sda2). Use fdisk -l to list all of the drives in your system if you're not sure.

First step, is to set both drive types to "fd" using fdisk:

fdisk /dev/sda1
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-5): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): fd

Once this is complete, we can get straight into setting things up! Make sure all your target drives are unmounted, and run the following command on the drive that has data already on it.

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 missing

That's it, mdadm has now created a new RAID array for you which is accessible via /dev/md0 if you are wanting to mount it straight away. We just have to add the other drive now, and let them sync up.

mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sda2

To see the status of your RAID array at anytime, simply use:

cat /proc/mdstat

Last step is to create the mdadm configuration file (automatically), run this command, and we're all set, and you can use /dev/md0 just the same as you would a regular drive in your system!

mdadm --detail --scan --verbose > /etc/mdadm.conf

Some big decisions were made. I sold my car which I had been building for the last 4-5 years, setup a whole heap of business related items, and squirreled away enough money to survive on for 6 months (on the assumption that business would be slow in the beginning). One of my goals was to match the wage I was earning at my previous employment, which I've done so far, and very happy about as it makes things a lot less stressful, financially.

Fortunately, things have gone really well, and I'm finding that while running a business requires a lot more responsibility, it is a lot more satisfying at the end of the day. I'm learning a lot from many of the people I'm working with in partnerships, and also starting to get some real world experience in offline advertising for netforge.

With that said, I am going to be posting a little more frequently, and there is a redesign in the works!