Anyway, shit venue aside, we had the pleasure of being suprised by Motley play a kick arse set, he truely knows how to hype a crowd up, unlike Phrase, who followed after him.  I’m not sure if it’s because Phrase was sick and losing his voice (that’s what it sounded like) but he just didn’t seem into it.  He actually seemed to relax the crowd before Bliss n Eso, which is a pretty big feat when you consider how hard Motley worked them up.

Summary: Great night, Great artists, Worth every cent and now onto the videos…

The debut album from Sydney artist Scott Burns, Day 1, comes out tomorrow at all good record stores.

Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view in hi-def

So this is the lead single off the Funkoars latest album, The Hangover, which is a follow up to the hugely successfull album, The Greatest Hits.  This will be the third album from The Funkoars and i personally can’t wait to see the direction they’ve taken their music, if Black Sally is anything to go by, i’d say we’re in for another great ride.  If you’re inrested in Black Sally, you can grab it now on iTunes with a bonus track that wont be on the album.

Theres a total of 24 icons in there, covering actions that we thought everyone could use. Of course, as always the designers are more than capable (and happy) to do more custom work for customers in this style and if theres enough backing, we’d love to do some more full sets.

Head on over and check out The Android Developer Common Icon Set, you know you want to.

We do a lot of online stores and one thing they have a lot of, is IMAGES.  One thing we do people hate us for, is store these in the database.  “It’s slow” they say, “It’s flexible” i say and we argue back and forth for hours.  Here’s the thing though, it’s only ever noticeably slow when you’re re-sizing them on the fly, otherwise the page load times are fine.

The problem only comes in to play when people are hammering your server and your image retrieval scripts are querying for images over and over again for images the users seen thousands of times before and already have a copy of in their local cache.  All because every piece of image display code you ever read for PHP never EVER includes local cache control, so everytime the person refreshes the page they get all 20 or so images again, for no reason.

So heres the secret, timestamp every row in your database with a last modified date, excessive? perhaps.. usefull? you betcha! Now, as early on in your application, as soon as you can, before doing excessive tasks that take time, check the date that corresponds to your page/image/whatever and send a Last-Modified: header value of that time.  This tells the web browser that you want to cache this file and that next time, it should send an If-Modified-Since: header in it’s request.

If-Modified-Since: is where the beauty lies, before you output the Last-Modified header and while you have the dates from your database, check them against each other, if the database is newer than If-Modified-Since, continue on as you would serving the site, but if not, fire off a HTTP 304 Status code and exit(); the application.

Why serve it if you don’t need to? the local cache is there for a reason.  Coming next, examples.

• Visual Assault - Captured Part 2
• The Landscaper - Issue 2, Page 2

The first comic that came to be was The Landscaper, this is a comic that deals with a very prevelant issue in todays society, the fact that people at a certain age are totally untouchable by the law.  Hopefully the comics’ way of handling this is a bit different from how it would be handled in reality.

The second comic is Visual Assault, which kind of came about as an accident.  The story behind Visual Assault is one of waring factions of eyes, competing to control the territory known as F.A.C.E.  Alot of the journey to and from work is usually spent by Chris and I discussing far-out stupid ideas, sometimes we bring them to life in the form of Visual Assault.

The two comics differ completely in style and thats probably why we’re both so comfortable moving between them.  The Landscaper is a graphic novel with a big storyline and a really rigid structure with humour as a small addition, where as Visual Assault is a panel-by-panel comic, with a small storyline, a very loose structure and is all about the humour.

Anyway, check out our comics and if you’re totally into them, we’ve created Facebook applications for both which you can see using the links below.  If you’re having trouble adding our applications, try using the NEW facebook, you may aswell get used to it now because over the next few months it WILL become the default.

• The Landscaper Facebook Application
• Visual Assault Facebook Application

As a short side-note for other Comicpress publishers checking out our comics, i’ve been working on a facebook application that integrates the comicpress system into facebook via a wordpress plugin.  If you’re interested in seeing this, drop me a line.