Chatter #31 - August 14, 2001

12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM

Update

Recently I found a site called the RPG Orphanage. It was a nice idea; a site memorializing and supporting roleplaying games which are permanently out of print. But they didn't include RQ, which could be the poster child for such games. I wrote to the webmaster/publisher, and offered to write something about RQ; he was interested. So I wrote an article for him and sent it over.

It has been a week or so, and I haven't heard from him. Looking back, I can see that there were rather specific guidelines for write-ups; perhaps I was a bit too opinionated. Or perhaps he's just busy, I don't know. Anyway, I re-wrote the piece a bit, expanded it somewhat, and have included a link to it on the main page as part of my quest to fill the left-side bar with enough text to keep the page looking balanced.

Weirdness

I don't know if anyone noticed, but things got a bit glitchy on the site in the past few days. It was kind of weird. Pages were truncated; most often at the navigation bar at the bottom, with the guestbook link and everything below it deleted. I noticed it, and after some puzzling figured out what was happening.

For some reason the transfers of some files were only going through partially, and then freezing. The HTML files on the server were ending up truncated. In some cases I'd then copied the truncated files over the originals on my PC, but fortunately I was able to grab some backups and get things put right—or so I thought. The files on my PC were corrected, but no matter what I did they would not transfer to the server!

I should make it clear that this was not due to cluelessness on my part. I'm very familiar with FTP; I should be, I've been doing it since 1996 and even before, with straight UNIX. I know the difference between a binary and ASCII transfer. My server space was nowhere near full, not by a factor of 20. For some mysterious reason the server was simply freezing up every time I tried to transfer these files.

So I telnetted in and copied & pasted the HTML in by hand from my source. Worked fine. It's nice to know UNIX and HTML.