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After Steven Den Beste died, some of the (many!) people who were concerned about the loss of his old web sites reached out to the family to try to recover the data from his server. I was pulled in because I was physically closest when it seemed like we might need someone to go to Portland to pick up the machine.

That wasn’t necessary, but since I was the one exchanging email with his brother, I was the one who ended up with a shiny little thumb drive containing the old Chizumatic site, and between that and the Wayback Machine, managed to synthesize a complete, functional website.

I packaged it all up, sent it to my not-so-secret allies, and then… nothing. This is not a criticism or complaint; everybody’s busy, and after that one energetic weekend, I hadn’t done anything about it, either.

But now I have a brand new virtual server at Amazon, where bandwidth is silly-cheap and disk space ain’t no big deal. And I’d already figured out the Nginx config to get the old server-side includes working.

So, this may not be the official permanent home of Steven’s old web sites, but it is a home, for a welcome houseguest.

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Free cheesecake at Amazon!

The very, very NSFW site bakufu has a nice collection of lingerie photos collected from Amazon listings, featuring a very cute AV actress. The outfit after the jump looked particularly tasty…

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Not mine, sadly, but the ancient NetEngine WebEngine that was dotclue.org for so many years. I pulled it from the co-lo on my way into work this morning, and its reward for fourteen years of faithful service will be a disk scrub and an e-waste bin.

By the way, for all the sometimes-deserved criticism that OpenBSD and its wranglers get, I was still running v3.3 without anyone ever successfully breaking in. I locked it down with a very small set of services, and required non-root logins with ssh keys, and Theo’s Paranoid Army took care of the rest. I applied the various security patches that came out in 2003-2004, but that’s it.

I don’t recommend not updating your server for 14 years, but you can go a lot longer between updates if you start with something designed for security.

Amusingly, I still own the even-older server that hosted munitions.com back in the days when it was shared between folks at WebTV, but I doubt I have anything left that could mount those disks to scrub them, so they’ll just get the sledgehammer treatment, and then go into the e-waste bin.

I refuse to apologize for what happened when the soundtrack from Mary Poppins was playing as I read Mauser’s comment about Lollygagging. Dedicated to Roman Polanski, of course.

🎵

“…and every pass I plan to make,
involves Delicious Cake.
A law, or three, won’t save young girls from me…

“Some champagne and a quaalude made the little girl go down,
the little girl go down,
the little girl go down.
But the booze, pills, and ass-rape were all felonies, I found,
so I fled the USA.”

It felt lonely in here, so I got Isso working for comments. Easy to nuke-and-pave if I don’t like it, at least. The whole “Python virtualenv” experience was a real pain in the ass, though, since pip install repeatedly claimed to have installed all the dependencies, while pip list called bullshit on that.

I’ll probably have to put Monit on the server in case it crashes, but that can wait.

Update

It’s possible to have Isso dynamically update the comment count in the article metadata block, but I just spent about an hour failing to get it to work, between Isso’s and Hugo’s overlapping limitations.

On the Isso side, you can either show the comment form or add counts to a page. They’re conflicting JavaScript includes, according to the docs. I could write my own bit of jquery to make an ajax call to retrieve the count and insert it into the page, but I thought that would be more work.

Until I ran into Hugo’s variable-scoping. When you render content in a list context, you’re really fully rendering each page in its own context and then including the results. So, inside a template, variables like $.Kind and $.URL refer to the individual article’s context, as if you were currently writing out that one article to disk. And of the two completely different ways you can set variables, one of them is strictly block-scoped, and the other is strictly page-scoped. You can’t pass either down into a partial template.

(there’s a partial-with-arguments called a shortcode, but that’s a completely different beast, and I’m not sure it is either effective or efficient to replace all your partials with shortcodes) UPDATE: completely impossible, in fact; shortcodes don’t work in template files, and partial templates don’t work in content files. They’re completely different things with completely different behaviors. You have to construct a custom dictionary and pass it into a partial template, which is butt-ugly and error-prone.

So, yeah, no comment-count on the home page at the moment.

4/12 Update

I wrote my own bitty Jquery function to use Isso’s API directly and insert the comment count on page-load. It would be nice if the API returned “0” instead of 404 errors when there aren’t any comments, though.

A little something to help Wonderduck through life’s trials.

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A long time ago, in a Usenet newsgroup far, far away, in response to a post on “Top Ten Reasons Magic is Better than Sex”, I wrote:

• Magic requires no foreplay; you can just grab a partner and start playing.
• you can switch opponents as often as you like, and no one will mind.
• brutally beating your partner is okay.
• Protection really works.
• Magic comes with a rulebook.
• parents don’t go crazy when they catch their children playing Magic with the neighbor’s kid.
• you don’t feel insecure if you have a little deck.
• you can play Magic while eating a sandwich.
• any number of people can play in a game of Magic, and everyone gets a turn.
• if your deck just isn’t working, you can blame it on the shuffle.
• Tom Wylie is easier to understand than Doctor Ruth.
• when you pay for Magic, you’re guaranteed of a good time.
• you can always get your partner to play Magic with you in public.
• you can shuffle your deck as much as you want.
• your partner can shuffle your deck, too.
• when you buy Magic, you know it’s fresh from the factory.
• when you get tired of a deck, you can make a better one.
• your neighbors won’t mind if you watch them play Magic.
• it’s okay to play Magic with your sister.
• you don’t need a battery-powered shuffler, but it’s easier than using your hands.
• you don’t have to tell your current partner about everyone you’ve ever played with.
• if you quit playing Magic and sell all of your cards, you can probably afford sex.

(I dug this out because I found the old “recently-spotted” link where someone had translated them all into Spanish. Link was still good, to my surprise.)