Milo's World
author's blog for Apr-Jun 2005

last update 2005Oct12 up home

Thursday, June 16th, 2005: I've been neglecting this blog in favor of tangential projects that've been absorbing my whole attention (minus a small amount of time that I've been working on digitizing the stacked-up MW notes).

I spent a few days writing dramatically improved backup scripts for both the MW Project in particular and all of my important data in general (I see I've talked about this below already).

I spent two weeks doing data-recovery from my main computer of about 18 months ago, and integrating much of that data onto my current computer (which is actually a home dir and a copy of MW both on a thumbdrive that I use on two different computers). This was primarily for the purpose of recovering my old web sites -- I want to set up a Milo's World promotional site and thought I might as well extract my old sites while I'm at it -- and to recover my old e-mail database, containing some material from my proofreaders I'd like to have on hand for the sake of completeness re: early MW chapters. It evolved into an effort to recover the entire old OS, which is now completely and safely burned to optical media and the original HDD blanked. (I'll probably rebuild an OS on it and run the machine as a non-essential router until the HDD dies once and for all -- one of next week's jobs.)

This week I've been spending in an effort to get Apache (Linux http server) and phpBB, an http message base package, up and running on a local machine so I can test everything out properly before hiring a company to do hosting for me `in the wild'. I want to make sure all the kinks are out before I'm dealing with an organization that might insist a problem at their end is a problem at my end... I like to know all the groundwork well in advance when this kind of situation could arise.

The purpose of getting a message-base package running is to be able to offer an interactive forum for the MW site. I've seen how active forums benefit sites like slashdot.org and aintitcool.com and it seems like a good idea to nurture whatever possibility of the same sort of spontaneous "interest feedback-loop" emerging over my own project (faint hope, perhaps :-).

After two plus days I had adequate success getting Apache doing what I want it to early last night (after spending all day Tuesday repartitioning my thumbdrive for complicated but mostly necessary reasons -- and {unrelated} Apache still has a pesky tendency to listen on 80/tcp when I only want it listening on 8080/tcp, but that's really unimportant at present). In a fit of creative effort I got phpBB running late last night too, but I'll need to put in some scripting time yet to get it fully playing nice with Knoppix, since my installation tends by default to be read-only. That's for tomorrow.

The requirements of phpBB are PHP (duh) and one of a variety of database servers -- I used MySQL 4.x locally and it worked beautifully with some ingenuity to circumvent Knoppix's impermanent /var/lib/mysql (the true path is /ramdisk/var/lib/mysql, which says it all) and a wonderful howto-for-dbase-virgins sort of document I found on the web. These then will be critical factors to look for in a host for the MW promotional site.

In light of the fact that this is supposed to be a writing blog, it's not hard to tell I was a professional computer nerd for years and years before I decided to try and restart as a professional fiction author. ;-) All this sounds like it belongs on my Linux front-page. I'll start talking about what I'm writing eventually, I'm sure, but what spawned this log in the first place was getting derailed from active work on MW in order to get some necessary technical matters out of the way for the MW site, and I'm not out of that cycle yet.

So tomorrow and perhaps Sunday I'll try to get phpBB integrated with Knoppix for persistence between reboots (I managed this with Apache; MySQL shouldn't be much different {hopefully}). Next week I'll test the build now and then... I'm sure the MySQL database will want backing up but I haven't established whether the phpBB dir among the sites directories changes or remains static after it's initially configured.

The week following I'll rebuild (or at least properly diagnose) my wife's computer, which died probably two years ago now and is going to make for a very uncomfortable summer if I have to fight with her for time on the one presently-operating desktop box we own. :-D Also I'll bring the box with the twitchy HDD I spent two weeks recovering back up and see what happens with it (her name is `Omaha' :-).

I'll work on the MW notes I've been neglecting during this one-and-a-fraction weeks as well, though the computer work, I will finally admit, is going to be the priority.

After that I'm into the writing schedule I established in my 2005May20 post, which is still perfectly good even if it's been pushed back a month (the second audit should be around that time too).

Friday, May 20th, 2005: Yesterday was the last day of my ten-day break from the Demon Bear sequence in order to enter assorted MW notes, but I'm finding that this is too nice (and organizationally beneficial) to stop just yet. Furthermore I've got the kernel of the new story to think about.

My revised timetable then is this: take today and next week to do more Milo's World notes. The week after that I'll try to eliminate the divergence in the Demon Bear file(s). The week-to-ten-days after that I'll write the new story with Deirdre, the Bear, and Willy that I was thinking of. The ten days after that I'll try to finish off the main Demon Bear sequence first draft entirely. And finally I'll go back to the Durant short story. That basically keeps to last week's plan but adds extra time for notes and for writing the new short story idea.

I've also got the second annual audit of the Milo's World material coming up.

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005: Last night I was thinking it's time I got something published, and was thinking I should pick up a fantasy magazine (I think there's one with Marion Zimmer Bradley's name on it) and see what's publishable right now. Then I got to thinking what kind of story I might write to go into such a magazine... something short, maybe part of Milo's World and maybe not. In a fine example of coming to a conclusion before I've done my research I found myself inundated with an assortment of related scenes and a fairly detailed plot to bind them. I don't know if I'll try to use this story for magazine publication or not, or if I'll even be able to, but it's the sketch for what I'm presently thinking of as `A Beauty and the Beast Story', featuring Deirdre and the Demon Bear and a brief appearance by the wisp.

Friday, May 13th, 2005: I suspect v6.1 of Windows vim is sometimes corrupting files it edits. I use primarily Linux vim to write and edit the Milo Project but toward the end of my work days I'm sometimes at a site where it's easier to use Windows vim than reboot into Knoppix, and other times at home I'm booted into Windows to do something Linux doesn't do well and it's easier to use it than reboot. At least three times over the past many months I've had corruption crop up, and I've been attributing it to filesystem errors. But the last time it happened I got an itchy intuition based on nothing I could think of that it might be Windows vim, and this time when it happened Windows vim was the -only- vim I'd been using. It could still be filesystem errors or even some other bizarre thing, but as a test I'm going to stop using Windows vim and see if the corruption repeats again.

I got my scripts done this morning, or last night depending on what you consider 1:00am. On the slate for the remainder of my ten-day `break' is a good chunk of the on-paper notes.

Tuesday, May 10th, 2005: This will be my writer's blog for the Milo Project. I've been tossing around the idea of writing something completely outside the Milo Project to get away from it for a bit -- there are periods when Milo becomes stressful. If I do that then I might expand the scope of the blog to cover other material. Heck, if I get good feedback I might expand it to a more general blog altogether... as I'm writing this I have an urge to talk about what a great story Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn (Vaughan?) is and a `rare' version (how can anything be rare once it's on the Internet?) of One by `Mettalica' (sic) a friend sent me last night.

I'm nearing the end of the first block of time spent working on the Demon Bear sequence; since it's relatively short, it'll be a complete first draft. But I'm getting burned out on a bunch of little things that need tweaked, added, or undone throughout the sequence to properly call it finished for now. I always have trouble in this, the `wrap up' phase at the end of any block of time spent writing or editing, when it's time to tie up all the loose ends. I usually handle it by shifting away and starting a block of time on another piece of the Milo Project, but this time I'm so close, that doesn't make much sense. I'm taking Thursday off from the store for a dentist's appointment so consequently I have extra time to work on the Project this week... so (because if I force it this'll just be wasted time) what I'm going to do to try to relieve my deadlock is get the Project all synced with its secondary backup (there's divergence because of the Demon Bear confusion) and burn a CD backup (it's past time), then spend a week to ten days away from the Demon Bear, starting by improving my Project backup-to-secondary script and writing a general backup-to-CD script. But I'm not going to start in a new part of the Story; if I do that I won't get back to this for four or eight weeks. Instead after the scripts I'll process some of the pile of on-paper notes that're thickening the Project binder since I've been focused on the Demon Bear sequence, or do some other minor-but-Project-related work. In three or four weeks when I'm done with this block of time on the Demon Bear sequence I'll probably get back to the Durant short story with Bester and Simak, maybe 40% done at this time.

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