Category: Metablogging

November 28, 2005 /

Okay, let’s be men for a minute. 101 words isn’t much of a challenge anymore. I’ve been cramming stuff into that space for almost two and a half years and, like a man who plays Tetris every day, I pretty much know what is going to fit where.

I don’t want to change that constraint on Anacrusis because, while challenge is an important part of a constraint, it’s not the only part. It’s an easy selling point; it’s a convenient finish line on days when I’ve got very little material. Besides, I like the form and I’m not done playing with it. But the fact remains that as a device, the word limit has lost much of its ability to stir up ideas.

So. Something new, with occasional interruptions, starting today.

Rita and the Cold Man Timeline

July 9, 2005 /

Because I promised Will I would. Keep in mind that this is only my personal ordering! If you find another way to arrange these that makes sense to you, that’s equally valid, and probably better.

  1. Part 1
    1. The boy who will be the Cold Man sees people he shouldn’t.
    2. The man who will be the Cold Man is imprisoned and tortured for information. He negotiates his temporary release.
    3. He presumably goes to the Numismata, becomes the Cold Man, and returns to his captors with five of his new friends.
    4. According to one of the Numismata, the Cold Man leaves their order at some point hereabouts.
  2. Part 2
    1. Rita joins an elite squad of operatives composed of Tina, Sandra and Mary, directed by Lou.
    2. On a mission, Rita meets the Cold Man and discovers a little of what he can do.
    3. Rita and her squad go on a different mission, in Chile. At some point, they become separated, and she meets the Cold Man again. Together they hide in a foxhole and end up in a cave. They discover that Rita can see the Cold Man, just as the Cold Man could once see the Numismata.
    4. The Cold Man finds that someone’s learning to counter his abilities.
    5. He meets with an Ad Hoc, who extracts a work agreement with threats against Rita.
    6. Something goes horribly wrong for him, and Rita dreams about it.
    7. The next day she receives a pointless surveillance tape. She investigates, solo, and an Ad Hoc warns her off. She investigates further and discovers the Numismata.
    8. Rita undergoes the Numismatic ritual, giving up warmth and color vision–and maybe more–in exchange for power. She wonders if it’s worth the Cold Man’s life; what she intends to do with that life is ambiguous.
    9. Rita returns to her HQ, which promptly blows up. She avoids death with her newfound abilities.
    10. Rita takes on the Ad Hocs.
    11. Rita kills the Cold Man.

No, Slatt and the one with the Great Zaganza don’t appear in here. Yet!

Site news that nobody cares about

July 7, 2005 /

Xorph.com served six hundred-odd pages to the Universitat Politècnica De Catalunya yesterday, which presumably means somebody in their CS department told a bot to crawl me–I’ve never seen them in my referral logs before. Anyone else get similar hits?

Also, Dreamhost now has a thing where they up your bandwidth and disk space quotas every week. It’s not much in terms of disk space–like 20Mb a week–but the bandwidth grows by a gig a week (both for the cheapest plan). Dreamhost is pretty great.

April 21, 2005 /

I’ve had to disable the little sidebar thingies that tell you when Anacrusis and NFD are updated, but hey, that’s what RSS feeds are for. It’s for the best anyway; that was some of the hackiest code I’ve ever written, and I’m glad it’s gone.

March 19, 2005 /

I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.

I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?

Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.

Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.

And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.