Baxil [bakh-HEEL'], n.

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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Baxil" journal:

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December 19th, 2007
02:13 am [Link]	ClaWrite: Not just for placeholders anymore This may not be news to those of you who read therithere and/or saw its latest comic, but I've updated (and moved) the ClaWrite page. Permalink, for those of you who want to update your bookmarks, is now the simple and memorable `http://draconity.com/clawrite`.* It still looks like crap, but it's now at least got a tutorial page up -- including full punctuation guidelines, which have been in existence but missing in action for the entire decade that the info has been online. (Happy anniversary, ClaWrite! Most people would say tin is traditional, but I got you punctuation!) For as little attention as I've given ClaWrite -- an alternate alphabet based on a 3x3 grid of strokes easily made with, say, a dragon's claws -- it sure seems to have captured people's imaginations. Back in my college days, the URL was apparently dropped into a column in the gaming magazine InQuest, which is about the closest I've come to 15 minutes of fame. And I've heard from people over the years who have used it in one capacity or another -- including, as the comic linked above points out, writing in diaries. I really ought to give the site a facelift and commission a proper font out of it. Which reminds me -- I don't have an informed opinion on the many alternatives-to-copyright that exist out there (copylefting, creative commons, GPL, etc). What would be the simplest way for me to preemptively tell people that $THINGY is available free of charge for non-commercial use and/or modification; as long as the original source (me) is credited and any modifications retain the same license? And hypothetically, should $THINGY gain enough popularity that people want to use it (or one of its derivations) in a for-profit scenario -- what protections would said license still offer? -- * Yes, draconity.com is me. This has the happy side effect that the Draconity FAQ is located at the wonderfully memorable `draconity.com/faq`. I feel guilty sometimes about not putting the domain to better use, but at least there's that. Current Location: ~/couch Current Mood: awake Current Music: Splashdown, "Karma Slave" Tags: draconity, requests, tlands, wordplay (9 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 20th, 2007
03:30 am [Link]	"Footnote Goto Considered Harmful" Tomorrowlands is back, and I'm going to bed. ETA:* The TTU wiki also appears to be working. As well as scripts. Please let me know if anything appears to have not restored properly. -- * Results may vary due to DNS propagation. Results may also vary depending on whether you ever look at the TTU Wiki. That appears to need more work.* * And if you e-mail me to complain ... well, e-mail's still in semi-limbo. In that it's getting through but is accumulating somewhere safe where I can't easily read it. (Sigh)** ** But the website's up!* *** This footnote is here as a breakpoint line so those trapped by infinite footnote recursion can have somewhere to jump without immediately exiting the post. Current Location: ~spiral Current Mood: exhausted Current Music: "Still Alive," Jonathan Coulton, Portal OST Tags:** tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 12th, 2007
07:35 pm [Link]	Using mod_rewrite to take down a whole site This is the product of half an hour of experimentation after research failed to provide a working answer. I hope it comes in useful for one of you someday. (n.b.: I also plan to bookmark it in my del.icio.us' web:repair category.) Do you need to redirect everything on a web site to the same page? (This can happen if you need to notify all incoming web users of critical server problems and/or slashdotting that will force an extended outage; or if you want to make a Web site vanish. My current problem is the former.) Put this code in the `.htaccess` file on the top level of your web directory. Change the two instances of "index.html" to the name of the page your message will be located at. Assuming mod_rewrite is installed and configured correctly, and the .htaccess file is readable by the web server, that should do the trick. ( Cut for non-webmasters ) Currently, you can see the results of this by going to any page at Tomorrowlands. I'd rather have the site back up, but at least this is better than nothing. (E-mail should work again too, btw. But the gmail address is probably safer for the moment.) Current Location: ~spiral Current Mood: drained Current Music: George Winston, "Longing/Love" Tags: geekery, tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
November 9th, 2007
12:00 pm [Link]	server issues Tomorrowlands is temporarily down. Any urgent e-mail should go to baxildragon .at gmail dot-com. Fortunately, I learned my lesson from last time. I have a full remote backup (from about eight hours ago, in fact) in case the server problem turns out to be more permanent. (And if I were really an awesome, with-it webmaster obsessed over my personal site, I could probably even set up some sort of failover. Seeing as how I'm now working at an ISP and all.) Current Location: ~spiral Current Music: "Keeper of the Flame," David Lanz/David Arkenstone Tags: tlands (Leave a comment)
March 30th, 2007
10:13 pm [Link]	Tomorrowlands ... appears to be up and running again. The backup restored peacefully and all the DNS issues have been smoothed out. I'm still not certain something didn't break in the transition, though. So if you notice any lost or missing pages at tomorrowlands, please let me know here. (If there's some egregious security violation due to the rush in setup, please be a white hat and e-mail me.) Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Music: Prana, "Moretsu" Tags: tlands (Leave a comment)
March 29th, 2007
10:19 pm [Link]	site outage The people running tomorrowlands.org's server (thanks inaki! :)) have been working quietly behind the scenes to migrate to a new setup. The upshot of this is that tlands is getting its own virtual host -- I get a whole (virtual) machine to myself, with root and all. The downside is that the migration ended up going a little bit faster than expected when some hosting company crap forced them to pull the old server early. I'd already switched over ttu.tomorrowlands.org to the new machine, so the wiki is still running smoothly. But I hadn't transferred over everything from tomorrowlands.org yet, so my main site and e-mail are both temporarily down. At least until the DNS changes propagate and I can get all the files in the right place. Also, first post from my new Mac! I'd love to glee about this at greater length, but I have some server issues to straighten out. -- Edit, 11:30p: Mail is up and running and the DNS was updated about five minutes ago. It took approximately eight seconds for the first spam to arrive. Edit, 12:45a: To answer the burning question on TTU readers' lips: Yes, hessus.tomorrowlands.org has a shadow file. `];=8)` </in-joke> Edit, 3/30 10pm: Things seem to be working again. crosses fingers Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Music: "Moonart," Chi A.D. Tags: tlands (Leave a comment)
February 23rd, 2007
02:22 am [Link]	Back-end work In more ways than one, that's been the theme of my last two weeks. Largely, the work has been behind the scenes; and for various reasons I haven't had the energy to keep my journal updated. February's been rather a frustrating month here at Chez Baxkat, but I feel like some breakthroughs are finally being made. Case in point. On the creative front, after finally getting my Tlands scripts working again, I've been throwing all my writing time into PERL instead of English. This has meant putting the TTU Wiki temporarily on hold, but I'm still rather happy with the work I did there throughout January. The page on The Meeting especially stands out -- bursting with new detail on an event I've never officially described or deeply explained. The upshot of this change in focus is that the resurrection of my website continues; as of early this week the adult-file script has been brought back to full working order (see e.g. Titania's Toys). Because the adult.cgi source code was by freak chance preserved, it was the easiest one to tackle -- the big challenge was to reconstruct my cgi libraries, and by starting with the adult script I could retrieve their old syntax, context and naming from existing code. Now that the template library is back up, virtually the only thing I need to do for the comics display script is to rebuild the template it used, most of which I can reconstruct from archive.org; and then the contact page script needs some of the logfile code I used in the adult script. After which Tlands is firing on all cylinders. In other technical news, Tlands now -- for the first time ever -- has one of those little address-bar graphics! ("Favicon.ico" for you web geeks.) Any page on tomorrowlands will show you the icon now. A subtle touch, but I got sick of seeing failed requests for it in the server logs. And I've been gradually cleaning old e-mail addresses off the site, replacing them with links to my Contact page. Once upon a time, it didn't hurt to have vanity e-mail addresses to help sort out mail by subject, but in these days of address-harvesting spambots, every extra e-mail address that gets placed on the web means another daily tidal wave of crap. A month or two back, I turned off the e-mail wildcard on my domain (i.e. anything at tomorrowlands.org gets delivered to me); now, of the 13 addresses I used to list, I'm down to 7, and my daily spam load has plummeted from about 700 (!!) to more like 250. Once the contact page is fixed I can nuke three more and I might even be able to look at my e-mail without wincing. On a financial front, there's been a lot of activity too. Lovely Wife kadyg had been hoping to go to cooking school this week ... that fell through in a flurry of bullshit from student loan agency Sallie Mae. A loan mistakenly flagged as abandoned on her credit report (the collection agency for it says it was paid; the school it came from says it doesn't exist; but either way it's Not A Problem) is holding up the financial aid request that would have gotten her started. We've shifted our plans to April, the fallback date when the next set of classes start. It hasn't been fun trying to get all that straightened out, but at least progress is finally being made. (Plus, I got my car smogged and can get the registration ironed out. Yay.) On the health front, it's been a roller-coaster but the end is in sight. ( The details; not nearly as amusing as last time ) So it looks like the original diagnosis (that the test failed to detect) may have been accurate after all: Clostridium difficile-induced colitis. Between that and giardiasis, I've now taken metronidazole for two of its top three uses. If I can somehow contrive to come down with amoebic dysentery, a Bacterial Bingo winner is me. Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Music: "If I Had $1,000,000," Barenaked Ladies Tags: american health care is a piece of shit, tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
February 12th, 2007
11:17 pm [Link]	Yaaaaaaaaaay! After many many many months of struggling and frustration, I finally figured out what was wrong with Tomorrowlands' scripts. The upshot: The journal script works! Journal permalinks work! About freakin' time! It'll take some more rebuilding to get the adult-files script, the contact script, the comics-display script, et.al. working again, but at least the major block has been removed. Edited to add: I cannot emphasize enough what an incredible feeling it is to have this change made. The practical effect is tiny, but my website feels fixed, dammit. This has been hanging over my head pretty much continuously since the server crash in 2005. Current Location: ~calorg Current Mood: exuberant Current Music: Internet radio singing "I believe in miracles" Tags: geekery, tlands (6 comments \| Leave a comment)
December 18th, 2006
02:50 am [Link]	Ten years ago today ... ... the world suddenly and irrevocably Changed. Ten years ago today, that first dragon to walk the earth sent shockwaves through reality that we are feeling still. Ten years ago today, magic returned. It's been a great ten years. So, happy birthday, The Tomorrowlands Universe. I got you a present. I am happy to announce that I have just opened the doors on the new TTU Wiki. As I and others have written almost a decade's worth of stories, the universe information keeps getting more and more scattered; it's time to start condensing that, and to make TTU what it was meant to be from the beginning -- a vibrant shared setting that a group of writers continuously draws upon and expands. If you're interested in The Tomorrowlands Universe -- as a writer, reader, or otherwise -- come join the wiki. Add and discuss ideas. Help make it your universe too. Don't worry if you don't know much about the story setting yet -- this is the best possible time to jump in. It's a new community, there will be plenty of energy and plenty of explanations, and we can answer your questions quickly and vividly. There's even (separate) plans brewing for online roleplaying. Hope to see you there. (Just be warned that the wiki is still very thin. The software's been polished and tested, but I had planned to give myself another week or two to build up the content there. Then I realized the timing of the anniversary was an opportunity I had to seize.) Edited to add: Comment here with your wiki username and I'll toss you editing privileges straight away. :) Current Location: ~/computer_desk Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: "10 Years On The Inside," Dwayne Ford Tags: tlands, ttu (9 comments \| Leave a comment)
December 1st, 2006
05:56 pm [Link]	In case the Internet seems a little smaller today From the current version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EveryDNS: "EveryDNS.net is one of the world's largest free DNS management services. As of 00:16, 2 December 2006 (UTC), its services, including all four name servers, appear currently to be offline due to a DoS attack. EveryDNS is the DNS management provider for almost 60,000 websites." Tomorrowlands happens to be among them -- as well as most of the other sites hosted on that server. So we'll be seeing a little bit of unexpected downtime until that clears up. The Tlands server itself is still fine (as far as I know), but without DNS, nobody can get to it.* -- * I know that normally you could just substitute the IP address, but since it's a single server with a number of virtual domains, even that won't get you to my website. Current Location: ~yuba Current Mood: irritated Tags: tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
October 26th, 2006
08:25 pm [Link]	Tlands downtime The server hosting Tomorrowlands.org was shut down for security reasons sometime yesterday. The administrators are currently in the process of scrubbing the computer and hope to have it back online sometime tomorrow or this weekend. Tlands will return shortly thereafter. Hopefully, this isn't causing too much headache to any readers of mine. Current Location: ~calorg Tags: tlands (Leave a comment)
September 3rd, 2005
03:22 pm [Link]	Elsewhere on the Net ... It's been a strange week. It's already Saturday morning and it still feels like Tuesday. I've been in at work for five days this week, and every single day has been the same damn news -- New Orleans flooded, lost, getting increasingly desperate, rescue efforts starting to crawl along. In a business where the big headlines leap on the page and off of it within a single 24-hour news cycle, where I'm used to having to refocus on new outrages and disasters every single day, to have such a slow-motion horror unfold has pretty much KO'ed my internal clock. But! At least I've been fairly productive. As you might notice if you go look at my Web site ... now with 60% less smite! There are still gaps in the content, and everything on the site that was driven by a script is going to have to be rewritten, since those were the worst casualty of the server crash ... but at least the site is up and limping now, rather than down and twitching. Plus, I re-uploaded some of the missing images from last year, put the fake California recall results (PDF) back online, and rewrote the lost content on the art page pointing to the most-irregularly-updated-webcomic-on-the-Internet, "My Afternoon: A Dramatization." (The full run of strips in its three years so far: 1, 2, 3. If I can get my desktop computer set back up after I move, I might even produce a comic for 2005!) Also, I had an amusing experience this morning better suited for dot_irony_oops than here, so I thought I'd give the community some lovin'. And now back to your regular Hurricane Baxil coverage. Forecast calls for a 99% chance of layout work, with a 60% chance of posting some quick links about Katrina, a 15% chance of venting at length later tonight and a 100% chance of trying to ignore the news completely all weekend. Current Mood: working Current Music: "Somewhere in the World ...", FFIV OST Tags: tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 29th, 2005
02:09 pm [Link]	More server news In an incident entirely unrelated to the Tomorrowlands e-mail outage, my mailbox got deleted during some upgrades and had to be restored from backup. If you've sent me anything in the last two weeks, chances are good that I did in fact see it, but chances are 100% that I don't have it now and can't reply to it. So if you kept a copy, please resend. Current Mood: Pre-work Tags: tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 22nd, 2005
12:02 am [Link]	Server update Tomorrowlands mail is up again. It has been for about 24 hours, so it should be stable and permanent again. If you've tried to send anything to me and it bounced, give it another shot. Current Mood: tired Current Music: ABG, "Recollection (Dynamis Mix)", www.vgmix.com Tags: tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
June 10th, 2005
02:12 pm [Link]	Tlands problems Yet more server issues. I may not be able to receive e-mail for a while. baxildragon at gmail can be used as a backup account. (Getting the Web site running again, however minimally, is also on the to-do list. Really, all I have to do is change the front page; all of the content that I'm going to be able to recover is already there where it used to be.) Current Mood: okay Tags: tlands (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
January 23rd, 2005
06:42 am [Link]	Part I: ... The Bad, and The Ugly By now, many of you have probably seen the new, (hopefully) temporary front of Tomorrowlands. That it's up and running at all is thanks to inaki after the Big Server Meltdown Of 2005. ( Taking inventory ) So. O Tlands readers. A coupla requests. Please consider them at least semi-urgent, since caches fade over time. (1) Do any of you know of a program (Mac, Windows, or otherwise) that will reconstruct a Web site from its Google cache or archive.org copy? I've seen a few that spider existing sites to create local backups, but haven't found any yet for reconstruction purposes. (n.b.: Freeware or cheapware is ideal, but pay software is OK too.) (2) Were you doing any surfing of Tomorrowlands in the last few weeks? Do you still have Tlands images in your local Web cache? I've still got the basic image set (the stuff that goes in the headers and sidebars for every page), but if you have random pictures that only show up inline, PLEASE PLEASE YES zip them up and forward me a copy. This goes double if you happened to be skimming Chibi Jesus and have the full-size pics for it instead of just the thumbnails I saved out of my own cache. This is a decent tutorial on how to nab files from your web browser's local copies. (3) Good thoughts for my lost data are also appreciated, especially good thoughts involving a stroke of luck that makes possible recovery. (No need to tell me about it, just think them.) Anyway, I'll be trying to rebuild Tlands for a little while yet. My e-mail has shifted over to baxil at dreamchaos.net for the foreseeable future if you don't trust the @tomorrowlands.org address to get through (though they do, at this point, go to the same place). Web services will remain mostly down, but you can certainly try to access any of the old pages by entering the full URL instead of surfing to it from the site front -- worst that can happen is it'll 404 you back to the "smite" page. Again, sorry for the inconvenience. Current Mood: gloomy Current Music: Ghetto Lee Lewis, "Lost in Time" OC Remix Tags: tlands (12 comments \| Leave a comment)
January 20th, 2005
11:57 pm [Link]	Why Tomorrowlands is down It runs on tiger.chameleon.net. Aaaaand ... bam. I apologize for the temporary inconvenience. If someone asks you where one of my webpages has gone, now you know. The one thing that does bite about this is that Tlands was my primary e-mail address. I may shift over to Gmail for the duration, except I still need to scrounge up a web-browser that can handle it. :-/ In the meantime, I'll check baxilgreendragon@hotmail.com and route LJ notifications there. Current Mood: bleh Tags: tlands (8 comments \| Leave a comment)
December 5th, 2004
01:12 am [Link]	QotD "Romanticism ought to one day strike a person as chilly. I think the movie 'Sleepless in Seattle' did the trick for some people, but I'll approach the task a little more abstractly. Let's take the classic romantic story of the knight slaying the dragon to get the princess. Remove the dragon and you do not have a romantic story, you have -- I don't know -- a society notice. "Romanticism is a trick; it seems to hinge on sexual devotion, but really hinges on the presence of an obstacle to the union that needs to be destroyed. When there's no obstacle, things turn unromantic and we don't know why." -- Scott Miller (Also reminding people that I'm posting again at Tomorrowlands. If you're a lazy LJer, you can simply add tlands_dot_org to your friends list for the RSS feed notification of new posts.) Current Mood: working Current Music: David Nelson Band, "Snakebit" Tags: tlands (14 comments \| Leave a comment)
May 6th, 2004
05:16 am [Link]	Addendum to previous post Reminder: Tomorrowlands.org == teh site redesign. Go look. Also! Since Movable Type has built-in XML/RSS/etc. support, this means I can make a new feed account and syndicate Tlands to Livejournal. Y'all will soon be able to read my journal right from your friends lists! Yay! ... The question is, does anyone here have XML experience, who'd be willing to talk me through some of the more arcane details? (I'm aware of the LJ FAQ on it; I'm aware it's a fairly simple process. What I'd like is some tips on how to tweak both XML and LJ to get it displaying the way I want, etc.) Tags: tlands (8 comments \| Leave a comment)
04:46 am [Link]	The new Tomorrowlands is up and running! If you're a regular, irregular or occasional reader of my website (and my real journal), please be aware that the Tomorrowlands main page has just undergone a significant overhaul to Movable Type -- and a significant redesign. (The rest of the site will follow as time permits. Consistency is a good thing.) Please update your bookmarks: the old "splash screen/home.html" setup has disappeared. In its place, www.tomorrowlands.org is all you need to type to hit the journal. (Nothing else on the site has moved.) Comments on the new design are welcome! ( mini-rant on CSS and request thereof ) Current Mood: accomplished but down-cycling Current Music: Weird Al Yankovic, "Polka Power!" Tags: tlands (4 comments \| Leave a comment)

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