Fanfiction – “Old Friends”

Posted on 2005-03-16 by Stephan Sokolow

Title: Old Friends
URL: Fanfiction.net
Author: Kawii-chan
Source: Ranma 1/2
Rating: 4/6
Type: Alternate Universe
Length: 5 Chapters so far

Concept: What if Ryoga and Shampoo were old friends?
Characters: OK. Doesn’t fall blindly into tons of cliches and portrays the characters but their personalities don’t come through as clearly as they could.
Plotline: Original and entertaining.
Grammatical Quality: Meh, OK. Proofread and enjoyable but not what I’d call professional by any standard whatsoever.

Modifiers:
-1 There’s the occasional missed error and the author overused capitals to portray shouting. (There’s never a need for captials to portray shouting)

Note: I’d give this a 3.8/6 but my current rating system only lets me give 4/6 with a -1 modifier.

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New Image Gallery

Posted on 2005-03-14 by Stephan Sokolow

I’ve hacked a copy of GallerPy 0.6.0 to work as my embedded image gallery script. It should look nicer for you and, since it’s now just click-and-drag to add images, it should get more maintenance.

I did notice an intermittent bug where the script would fail and require clicking on reload several times but since I don’t have access to server logs and the problem seems to vanish when I turn on extended error messages (cgitb for you Python geeks), I’ll just have to leave it.

I’ve also noticed that WordPress can sometimes be slow when serving up the site updates listing but I don’t know what to do about that yet.

Posted in Site Updates | 4 Comments

Experimenting with WordPress for Site Updates

Posted on 2005-03-13 by Stephan Sokolow

Well, I’m as lazy (but challenge-loving) as ever so I’ve decided to try and make the site updates listing into a WordPress category without separating them from the main site or greatly changing the layout. If you see this on the main page of my site, then I was successful.

Posted in Site Updates | 2 Comments

The Internet Archive

Posted on 2005-03-12 by Stephan Sokolow

I’ve used The Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine for years to find pages which had otherwise dropped off the web. What I didn’t notice until recently, is their extensive and highly useful collections of other media.

Why bother with such an archive? See their reasoning or take a look for yourself. For example, their video collection has:

They also have an archive of non-web texts and are working to archive old software so that copies will remain in existence when their copyright has expired.

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NoDoS 1.0 alpha

Posted on 2005-03-11 by Stephan Sokolow

I consider myself a pretty likeable guy but occasionally, I run across someone with a chip on their shoulder or someone who has a whole lot of IRC bots and is trigger-happy. And then there are the people who don’t like me because they don’t like my friends. As such, my home connection has been pushed off the net three times in the last 18 months by what’s called a Flood-style Denial-of-Service attack.

In each case, all I had to do was disconnect and reconnect to throw them off by changing my IP address. (Well, and avoid whatever method they were using to find my IP address) But last time, I was sleeping all day and my brother woke me up at 3PM because he needed the net back.

Long story short, I wrote something to automatically trigger a disconnect-reconnect cycle when I get DoSed. If you’re a geek, check out NoDoS in the Python section of my main site. If not, just think about this; my home network should now be able to survive without any maintenance for over a year without falling to viruses, spyware, or hack attacks as long as I keep paying my internet bill. (Well, and replace any failed hardware but that’s still beyond the reach of self-repairing programs.)

I think that means it’s more secure than most corporate networks, wouldn’t you agree? (Note: User training is also an important part of my security strategy.)

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Fanfiction – “Slayers Demiurge”

Posted on 2005-03-10 by Stephan Sokolow

Title: Demiurge
URL: Main Site, RAAC-stored copy of the first six chapters. (Note: Main site has some nice fan art)
Author: Stefan Gagne
Source: Slayers
Rating: 5.5/6
Type: Continuation/AU (A continuation, but a fairly big deviation from how things would have continued in Canon)
Length: 8 Chapters, Complete

This is one of those stories that just holds together, actually gets to the end, and falls into that category of pseudo-professionalism that you get from the best fanfics. I highly recommend it if you don’t mind something that’s almost an alternate universe. I’d try to summarize the story but I can’t really do that without killing at least one of the jokes.

Bonuses:
+1 for general good writing
+2 for not only being funny, but funny in a way which feels original and flows well as an integrated part of the story. In addition, it lasts throughout the series without getting boring.
+1 for going above and beyond the call of duty in originality. (Need to read more Slayers fanfics first but even so, I think I know a good original story when I see one)

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TV-B-Gone

Posted on 2005-03-04 by Stephan Sokolow

I know what I want as my next gift, TV-B-Gone.

What? You think I’m nuts for not liking TV, Turn Off Your TV. (And I found the site AFTER I lost interest in TV)

Posted in Geek Stuff, Web Wandering & Opinion | 1 Comment