December 2005 Archives

So what have I accomplished over the last few days? Nothing of substance. Oh, substance all right, but not particularly interesting substance.

Avarthrel web site got absolutely no visible changes. Well, small visible changes, if you take the meaning normally. "Visible" in this case meaning "actually new content". The changes were all under the hood: There site is now based on Smarty templating system, which helps me manage the content's formatting and editability better. Sure as hell made life with the NWN site easier, hope this will make the site updates easier too!

Today, I also wrote a new feature for the site, a small Ruby script that does, wow, comments. Yep, you can now comment on the stories on this site.

Now my greatest problem is producing actually more stuff for the site.

Update: Wow. Just looked at the blog's article history and found someone's been linkspamming shit. I think the fact that I used "an evil SEO corporation" as an example when making the comment script was somewhat... premonitious in nature. =) Hmm, Typo really needs an option to delete comment spam en masse...

Tonight's fun Subversion and web-messing operation: Adding the stories to the web! Well, they're now in the Avarthrel web site. The web site itself needs a lot of work: I think I'll need to use Smarty stuff or go for XSLT like I did with some of my furry stuff (sounds pretty likely...) and I definitely need some overview pages. But the stories are there.

What a sorry lot is that, only two and a half stories so far. I really need to write more! I hope I'll find the fudgy-legal WP5.1-DOS-FIN copy from somewhere among the floppies... =) I didn't find that so far, but I found a copy of TEKOPlus instead. Egh. Maybe I need to do Knuths and write a word processor before I really start making this stuff?!

As I updated the page, the page made me to ask myself... why do I write this stuff? The answer is quite simple: I want to write "Traditional Fantasy". That means, I have to pick up some things other people have been using and do something else with it, if I happen to be in that mood! So this is both an excercise in trying to show restraint and creativity, and it's definitely a thing to try to tell me that I absolutely don't need to make everything myself! Um, and also, the bigger thing is, I felt the need to write a little bit of this, too, and now that I've written a little bit of fantasy, I can't control the hunger. I'll stay, I'll write.

One more thing - I'm writing some random bits again on the inter-character relationships (specifically, Facyr and Faira). I'm not sure to what extent that story bit will appear in the next story - I might go on with a bang and add the whole lot. The only thing that makes me itchy is that I am, unashamedly, asking questions about myself that I've been pondering about in real life, writing them through a boring self-insert character Facyr, and gathering the answers in form of a reply. Though, on the other hand - what the heck, I'm probably not the first to do this. At least I admit to doing this. =)

Hmm, and I really need to make a list of Fantasy Authoring Cliches that I absolutely need to do because they actually add quite a lot of spice to the books. Hmm. Creating a D&D setting? A little bit of conlanging? Oh, my, my character naming shows a really, really disturbing lack of aposthrophes. And so on, and so forth...

This blog posting was made with Genuine 0-Day Warez.

Specifically, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.

This thing was genuinely the greatest thing for writing when I was a kid. Our school computers had this thing, and my father had it on his computer since he is a teacher. The school sure doesn't use it now, I wish I had had the opportunity to grab the properly licensed copy from the trash heap...

It's pretty weird to use this thing after so many years. It works pretty well in DOSBox. And even weirder to see it in English - the school copy was, of course, in Finnish.

And of course, right now, the license is held by Corel, who don't want to part with this thing at all - oh, no market for DOS programs these days. Oh, and not abandonware either - you can buy this thing on CD-ROM from some obscure place that only sells to USA.

I beg you, Corel, to either zip WP5.1 together with DOSBox and stick it on your website and market it as "the perfect Linux wordprocessing package", or give us a Leet and Appropriate New Version of WordPerfect that runs in Linux once again, supports OpenDocument, and such. Aww heck, nobody reads this blog anyway, and obviously a big mean corporation can't listen to reasonable requests.

I seriously need a DOS WordPerfect clone to get any real writing done. This thing frigging rules.

And why does it rule? Well, for one thing, this thing only shows text, text and text. OpenOffice.org shows everything and formatting - OO.o has a "Web layout" mode, which comes close, but isn't quite what I was looking for.

Secondly, this thing doesn't waste too much space on extras. There's a status line, a menu bar, all take three lines total. What else does anyone need, anyway? Luckily, OO.o can be stripped of extraneous crap.

Thirdly - the screen layout. Blue background, gray text. This thing just looks nice. Black on white is getting pretty annoying pretty fast. Also, there's no such thing as long lines here. 80-column display isn't that bad to work in, and even here, word wrap is seen.

WordPerfect is just about the best program I've seen for the specific purpose of writing text. The new programs try to roll in together two things that don't work well together - writing text and formatting it.

If I were to write a word processor, I'd make a WordPerfect clone that world be written in C/C++, run in ncurses environment, use OpenDocument as the native file type, and also allow exporting to various formats. (Hmm, I note that for the purposes of writing blog posts, WP5.1 isn't pretty good - can't export directly to Textile markup...)

One bad thing about Instiki, which I chose to do my stuff organisation, is that I can't move my stuff as easily. Instiki runs just fine on stock Linux, but I can't just carry the stuff over and fire it up in OS X (10.3, that is, which happens to have Ruby 1.6 and Instiki wants 1.8). Why portability matters? Well, there's this certain need to stay behind a 56k modem.

And funnily enough, Instiki's storage is in an incomprehensible format. Too bad wikiware authors have not yet agreed on a common interchange format for wiki data that could store the document history, so changing wikiware would be much easier. I could, for example, run instiki in Linux and SnipSnap in OS X.

Well, at least Instiki exports current version of the wiki to HTML...

It turns out Subversion is highly cool when doing stuff on someone else's computer: Just svn co svn+ssh://host/dir/trunk foo and I have a complete copy of my work, kept in synch with the repository. And also works wonderfully over modem!

Now all I've got to do is to do some work on the stuff...

Doing work elsewhere has other weird sides though. Specifically, I decided it'd be cool to have a pad where I could write things down. I bought a nice A4-size pad from the university store, just that I got a little bit scared about the price of 5 €. I actually needed another pad to write down game notes - and that's what that first pad I bought ended up being used for. I decided to buy another pad later.

So, on the road, I picked up another pad, similar to the one I had bought. A5 size, since that was the biggest they had. Price? Um... 5.40 €.

I have an annoying tendency what comes to my projects. I start using version control software too late.

Version control software is my idea of preserving history. And I do care about preserving history! Most people think version control is only good for managing software source code, but I've noted it's very handy for website stuff management and, by extension, very VERY handy for all sorts of text stuff.

It sure is more handy than OpenOffice.org's own revision management system. I just wish Subversion could do diffs on OpenDocument files (no, OO.o's idea of version diffs display isn't good in my opinion)...

Today, I created my Subversion repository for storing my files. My first "subversive" changes were making note of the changes I had to make on the first few stories.

I have this attitude that whatever's published shouldn't be changed - though if it's an article, it could be added to, if it's an artwork, it could always be remade from ground up if it needs to be. But in these stories, I think I made newbieish small mistakes (not sticking with spellings of names, mostly); I just updated the stories at deviantART. Just damage control: Everyone's allowed to have awful newbie stories, but it'd be ridiculous not to fix these small mistakes.

I think it's very fair to record all changes though. The old versions live in my Subversion repository.