February 19, 2006

Roy G. Biv is Dead

Whoever came up with 'Roy G. Biv' as a memory aid for remembering color names had to scratch for vowels.

Red, Green, and Blue are necessary, of course as those are the three colors our eyes are 'tuned' to perceive, with all other colors being combinations of these primaries.

Yellow is a good addition, since although it isn't a true primary, it is the brightest color we perceive since both red- and green-sensitive retina in our eyes are stimulated by it, making it appear nearly twice as bright as red or green alone.

So with RyGB we have three primaries and one secondary formed by combining red and green.

If we combine red and blue we get purple, which in some ways isn't a true color since it doesn't appear in rainbows or when white light is shone through a prism.

There is a third secondary color, that appears after mixing blue and green, aqua, teal, cyan, indigo are all in the same ballpark of the spectrum.

Indigo starts with a vowel, so let's use that.

Now we have RyGiBp.

We need more vowels, though.

Orange is a tertiary color, made by combining primary red with secondary yellow, but it's a common-enough color and everyone knows its name, so let's add that.

Roy Gi Bp.

Doesn't look right.

Let's assume that no one remembers what indigo actually looks like since most people aren't involved in textile dyeing nowadays, and let's pretend that indigo isn't a greenish blue but a purplish blue.

Roy G. Bip

And let's change 'purple' to 'violet'

Roy G. Biv

The point is that indigo is actually closer to a teal color and is between green and blue in the spectrum.

In computer color systems, more and more color names are added to libraries so that people don't have to remember RGB hex values, but I've noticed that indigo is being mapped to RGB: 440088, which looks purple to me.

  #440088  

If you look at actual indigo-dyed cloth, as in the undoctored image above, you get a hex value closer to one of these:

  #2D3E61     #263961     #2F3D5C  

Posted by mslaybau at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2006

Web Hosts

edit:
Johnny B told me about
www.top-10-web-hosting.com
which lists what seem to be some of the best hosts out there.

Lunarpages offers 400GB per month of bandwidth for $8/month.
I just signed on with them to host the Obion games since they've gotten so popular (100,000 players within three weeks)

---

I've tried a number of web hosting services in the past 9 years and have two to recommend. A number of people have suggested dreamhost to me, but I've heard just as many complaints about them.

It seems the three key aspects of having a service are:

Regarding these three, I recommend pair and lamphost.

Their prices are competitive (pair in particular has such an economy of scale because of the large number of sites they host that their rates are quite cheap) and they have effectively no downtime, but what separates them from other hosts I've encountered is that the service and support is excellent. Unlike so many other companies (whether web hosts or otherwise) pair and lamphost respond immediately whenever there's an issue that needs to be resolved - lamphost is particularly good in that regard.

In this modern age it seems that many companies abandon customer service in order to save money, or relegate it to foreign offices where the workers have trouble with English and don't have access to the systems they would need to make changes. But these two haven't.

Posted by mslaybau at 12:31 PM | Comments (1)