1. An incomplete transfer of the requisite files.  Don’t insist that you’re certain that didn’t happen, even if it’s from a command like svn or cp that shouldn’t fail; you’re not certain until you’ve checked.
2. PHP has run out of some resource, typically RAM.
3. mod_security is set up brokenly

[digg-reddit-me]In both cases, you can figure out which by checking your apache logs.  On windows, go to the Windows Event Viewer.  On unix, this may live in a variety of places; most common is shared hosting by cpanel/plesk, where you can get it in your control panel, or to just look in /var/logs/ .

If it’s #1, you’re likely to see something like this in logs (this is from my site, which just suffered this problem and was quickly fixed) :

[Tue Jul 15 18:45:28 2008] [error] [client 24.117...]
PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function
force_ssl_admin() in /var/www/html/wp-settings.php on
line 390, referer: http://.../wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=55

Don’t worry if that undefined function has a different name or a different referrer, or whatever; that’s how you track down missing code, and missing code means some file didn’t get updated.

I’m already doing complex efficient randomization, API access, bulk posting, timed bulk posting, base autotagging, auto-categorization, a catalog widget, and I’m going to make sure that my stuff is compatible with the All In One SEO pack.  I’m going to provide integration points, and I’m going to provide an example integration with LightBox, or one of its relatives.  I’m going to provide voting, moderated tag suggestion and home-post permalinking.

I’ll also be writing strict, browser/version portable code without hacks.  Yay!

Please let me know what you’d want to see if there were a new image plugin coming out.

Time to give the masses what they want, I guess.  In the upcoming month or two, I hope to release my modest testing library, my stub webserver and my utility library.  If they get useful traffic, maybe I’ll release more.

Stay tuned.

I’ll be moving content from several old sites, including sc.tri-bit.com, blog.sc.tri-bit.com, stonecypher.net and others, to this site by 301 to keep as much rank as possible.  That said, there’s a whole *lot* of half-written content on several of those sites, as well as content I haven’t gotten around to releasing, and I haven’t updated my image collection in years.  This is about to change.  (I’m not 301ing the old images so that people who’ve been using them in forums and so on don’t get a bunch of busted images; the old site is on a server that’s going to keep running.)

This’ll be a better site than my last several, and a lot more uniform.  I’m going to start doing a lot of new stuff, including some made-for-redistribution video tutorials that should make my old tutorials look pretty flimsy by comparison.  There are some games in the wings, too, and I’m going to start getting some shared resources together for flash developers.  I’ve been writing some Erlang material, too, and I’m really starting to like the way my tutorials come out in that language, so maybe it’s time for a directional shift.

Maybe more importantly, I’ve made a bunch of updates to some libraries that I had released as well as a bunch of libraries that I hadn’t released.  Quality has increased significantly.  I’m also setting up a SupportSuite instance to help support those libraries more effectively (I’m quickly falling in love with SupportSuite).

Finally, I’ve pretty much given up on hybrid sites.  I’m going to be using pages instead of the wiki from here on in.  Should be a lot easier to deal with.  So, the new site should have a great proliferation of static pages.

In short, there’s a whole lot of new stuff coming.  Stick around.

[?php jal_democracy(3); ?]

That poll above is the fusion of two plugins – Democracy AJAX Poll, and Exec-PHP. The bulk of the work is just Democracy doing its thing. However, Democracy is intended to be embedded in the site’s theme, such as in a sidebar box; you embed it by calling a function using the poll index as an argument, or blindly, and it’ll use the currently “active” poll. Lord knows my sidebar box is cluttered enough as is, and polls make more sense for me inline to posts than they do other places. Active polls aren’t really my thing, though they may become so in the future (it’d be easy enough to permanently embed an active poll in the side while keeping these inlined ones too.)

In order to get them inlined, I just pulled Exec-PHP to call the Democracy plugin from within a post. It’s quite neat, really. I had to make a trivial batch of edits to Democracy, because Word Press runs nl2br() on the plugin’s output, which injects spurious breaks that I don’t want; really all I did was to remove the whitespace from the plugin’s original output, and everything else Just Worked™.

I continue to be impressed with Word Press.

• Adrian
• Annette
• CmdBeavis
• Dawai
• Drano
• Elise
• Forger
• Furan
• Josh
• Magey
• Michelle
• Pauly
• Programax
• Rich
• Wyatt

And, Firefly, where did all your pages go?

Also, I would have been wrong. Word Press turns out to be exactly what I wanted.

Word Press is a somewhat difficult beast to describe. For all its widgets, it’s actually pretty stripped down, which I like. Very little cruft to get in the way of things. It’s built on standards compliant XHTML, has clean CSS skins, and generally doesn’t try to get in your way. Panels are all foldy, and you can drag your edit window to resize to your screen – particularly nice given that my laptop has a funny aspect screen.

I learned the importance of drafts the hard way, something I kvetched about in an earlier entry; in Word Press, drafts are listed at the top of every write post screen. It’s in fact quite a nice layout, and is relatively low-hassle. Importing the posts from my previous hackadelic blog extension for MediaWiki was also relatively painless, as was setting up the various panels on the right column.

All in all I’m impressed, and I’m not impressed by many products like this. Way to go, Word Press.

Don’t get me wrong – I still love my wiki dearly. That said, connectivity is a bigger deal on the web than it is anywhere else, and thanks to the new boom of speculation driven by such fancy buzzwords as AJAX and Web 2.0, there’s a tremendous amount of new technology and effort going into the whole thing.
For a while, I had been thinking about attaching XML-RPC behavior to MediaWiki by hooking page actions with extensions; I still think this is a profitable mechanism, and I really wish I could have wikitext markup in my blog. But, there’s a whole lot of stuff involved with supporting the bujllion different RPC implementations out there, and it’s an ever changing field with which I just don’t have the time to keep up. So, why bother? There are perfectly good open source blog CMS implementations out there, many of which are far better than I care enough to implement myself. Wheel reinvention is, of course, the devil, and whereas it may have been fun to half-implement blogs in a wiki, when it comes down to it, I just don’t have the time to do it right, thanks to the corporation I’m starting. So, maybe I need to get over the whole “I need to write everything myself” attitude and just use the existing tools. I guess the next step is to start pulling over the blog entries from my previous blog, and start putting them in here instead.

I kinda wonder whether allowing user commentary is gonna make much of a difference. We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

Ze streak! She is the broken!

I’m gonna try using this blog to release stress, because for one I’ve got it in spades – yay for starting corporations – and for two maybe if it works, I’ll start being a little bit more regular with my posts. Besides, that’ll give me some content to discuss on a regular basis other than my roguelike Southgate. This is important, because now that I have about sixty five full time jobs, I rarely get out of the house anymore. Hopefully that’ll change once the company’s off of the ground.

So, what to talk about? I still can’t talk much about that; the patents are only partially underway, and I’m being a total secrecy freak. All I’ll say is that it’s for the Nintendo DS, that it’s a huge risk, that the reward is gigantic, and that if I somehow manage to pull this off, things are going to change in a relatively surprising fashion. I’m not one prone to hyperbole, so people who know me, maybe pay attention. I really believe that if this works, it’s going to be a capital b capital d Big Deal. Of course, in order to get that initial capital I have to give half the horse away, which tehsux. Also, I have to give a big chunk to my new business partner, because she’s making this, um, what’s the word, possible. That all said, I talked to my friend Brooke about this (luckily he doesn’t give a damn about my blog so he’ll never read this,) and he says the deal I’m getting is actually pretty sweet, and that I’m offended by the numbers is me just being a business noob. Sure, from my perspective the equity I have to hand out – approximately two point three bujillion dollars for every peso invested – seems a mite on the high side. Apparently though, this is the norm, as much to recoup investments into other companies which failed for a given investor as because they have barrels with which to bend people over.

I still want to keep 110%.

I’m kind of excited in that several of my friends are among the initial investors. That I didn’t expect, but when I’ve mumbled about what I was doing, several people whose opinions I value have done the instant messenger equivalent of the pants crappery dance, and have requested to jump onboard. This means that some of the people who I’m making Bruce Wayne rich in exchange for handing me the price of an extra value meal will actually be people I give a damn about. This, it turns out, is double-awesome.

Y’see, if someone had asked me before this all started whether I’d ever take money from a friend, my answer would have been a flat no. Totally not about the spreading of the risk to people I care about. Not into the whole notion of if I go down, I drag my friends down with me. That’s something you expect from scumbags who care more about getting ahead in the world than their interpersonal relationships or their honor.

Or, at least, so I would have said. Then, I started telling one of my dear friends what I was up to, and I swear to god I could hear him hyperventilating over the internet. He all but stuffed a wad of money in my face, and then told me he was going to get his brother in on it too. And, combined with a different one of my investors, who was once a professional gambler and gave me a very clear view of things as his not investing money he couldn’t afford to lose, it turns out that my beliefs about appropriacy in investment are starting to 180. I used to think friends and family stock was generally morally bankrupt. I’m starting to understand it now, and why it’s there, and I’m starting to think about maybe offering it. Being able to support one’s family’s fiscal development by directing capital into things you have faith will grow turns out to be a warm fuzzy feeling, not a cold clammy feeling. And, to be quite clear, that’s a big surprise to me.

So, I’ve now opened investment to half a dozen friends. Three months ago I would have been appalled by the notion, and would have insisted I’d only accept investment from professionals. Now, I’m starting to get out of this kneejerk reaction I have of preventing people from getting into danger. To be plain, my friends are adults, and they don’t need my watchful eye. If they believe in what I’m doing, I’m starting to believe that they should just be allowed to take the risk with me. Hell, one of my friends is going on a private crusade for me; he grew up in one of those Money areas of the United States, and he’s gone back to talk to the people with whom he grew up, who can throw around six digits without much concern.

Only takes one, right?

Anyhoo, that’s why I’ve been gone for a month – I’ve been stupid, I forgot, the reminder I made for myself disappeared until just now, and I’ve been so far past nose to the grindstone that the inside of my skull is getting grindwheel marks. I’ve been whoring up initial funding, setting up services, registering a corporation, filing for patents, getting patent lawyers, getting IP lawyers, getting marketers, and even occasionally working on the actual product. It’s kind of nice that the actual product is already done; that way I don’t have to feel like this is all bass ackwards. I can just watch a real businessperson do her thing, and learn from it, instead of indulging in second guesses the whole way.

More on how lucky I am to have found my business partner another day. She’s awesome in the way that my artist is awesome, except with spreadsheets instead of pixels. She sees the potential and she’s just working on making it happen, because she knows I’ll do the right thing and make the bootstrap people rich with me. She’s been working hard, too, and with nothing more than the promise of the company output itself. Sure, this is what you always hear about in the stories of people having made it work, but actually landing someone like that turns out to be a whole different matter.

Anyway, here’s some Charles Bronson Murderology for the palette.

And, I’m back.

• Jobs
  • I have two jobs right now, both of which are full time, and only one of which pays. This is a surprisingly brutal position, moreso than it’s been in the past when I’ve done this before, largely due to the nature of the second, non-paying job.
• Starting a Business
  • I’m starting a business again. Unsurprisingly, this is the second non-paying job. Problem is, unlike the last few times, when I was just spinning up some project to be sold off (which, hey, I’m also doing – look for RoffleBlox sooner or later – so I guess it’s actually three jobs,) this time I’ve got a real business partner who’s raised eight digits for more than one business in the past. I’m not looking for anywhere near that kind of money, but I am looking for major money, so this time I’m having to write all sorts of business documents and patent applications and whatnot.
• Sidenote
  • Lawyers suck.
• Where Am I? Who Am I?
  • I don’t really have a direction yet. I really should be commenting on game design, which is my strongest field and one of my deepest loves. The problem is, every time I want to talk about something, I get all retentive and act like it’s some kind of state secret, so this takes time. I’m starting to let loose on one of my designs, especially since Oasis came out, and did one of my games better than I did. Luckily, I never showed my game around, nor did I release it, so I can’t entertain any notions that they stole my work; they’ve never seen it, so it’s an honest to god reinvention. Besides, they did a better job of it. I’m retooling my game, which has several fundamental differences from Oasis which I believe will bear out my design in the long run, but I’ve learned several things from Mind Control, especially as regards drastically simplified interfaces. I can tell that in the long run, I’m going to consider having seen their game as an important step in learning to pander to the casual gamer.
• Civic Obligations and You
  • Jury duty. I mean, come on. ”’Jury”’ duty. Who does this shit anymore? Can’t we just execute them and move on?
• Arranging compiler extensions
  • One of my side projects for the Nintendo DS, seperate from my work on the platform, requires several things that neither the CodeWarrior toolchain nor the SDK provide. Unfortunately, I’m bound not to say anything by the NDA, so all I can really do is say “it’s missing something;” this is a problem because in the past sometimes my just saying “wow I wish this was around” has led to people pointing out existing resources to me. Yay for NDAs. So, I’m funding an extension to the compiler on personal money from another licensed developer.
• Teh Netwark
  • Hackery on the NDS WiFi Stack which was generated by my DS WiFi Bounty. It’s good enough for amateur use, but it doesn’t work in the SDK, again for reasons I’m not allowed to explain. I’m attempting to arrange changes to it as well, but it’s not entirely clear if I would be allowed to use the stack once modified.
• Sidenote
  • No really, lawyers suck.
• What’s a RAFB City
  • Work on RAFB City. No, it’s not over. Yes, I am making new cartoons. Yes, I know it’s been two years. Yes, I know most of you don’t care anymore. I’m still making more, because I think they’re funny.
• You Ain’t Foolin’ No One, Chump
  • Work on the book that got this site started in the first place. You know, it’s funny: as soon as I put this site up, I made a local replication, and all my book work has gone on on the laptop, instead of on the web. For some reason this site ended up accumulating all of the crap I’ve put up since I put up the system, and some of that crap has gotten popular, especially the image collection and some of the rants. That said, the book has progressed significantly; I have quite a bit of material now, and the book has a ”theme”. You heard me, a ”theme”. Wait’ll you see it; it’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done, and that’s saying a lot. I think it’s awesome.

Balls. I mean, there’s a lot of crap going on in my life right now. Trying to raise capital, even with a business partner, is a tremendously time consuming and exhausting process, one which leaves you feeling more than slightly like a whore. That said, it seems to be leading to the completion of one of my dream projects, the kind of thing you just can’t do without Big Money Backing™. As such, I’m only gonna complain a wee bit.

Am I going to start blogging regularly? Yeah, eventually. I’m getting less bad about it, or at least so I’m telling myself. But, nobody tell DrgdHmstr, or I’ll never hear the end of it. (Not like I would anyway. <3 Hammy.) Until then, a hearty humbug to all, and learn to spell, please, for the love of any God in which you choose to believe.