| Thursday,
May 20, 1999 I can get on here direct, and save to here. As of now I can't
work locally and then publish to out there, or at least the last time I tried it, I got
the stupid time out errors again. I then tried ftp and while I could log on to here with
ftp, when I tried to send something out to the web server access was denied. This is now
the fourth day to waste on this. Eventually it has to work smoothly. I wonder when that
will be? So we keep trying.
At some point this will all work. But so far it doesn't, not really.
However I can modify this while it purports to be publishing last iteration. Let's see
what that brings us... It no longer suws which page it is publishing, which it used to do.
Why I don't know. But the percentage done is moving faster than last attept making me
believe that it really did manage to change some of them before it timed out. We'll see.
Perhaps. Just perhaps. If it updates...
It doesn't, so I did it directly, and said:
Meanwhile this is the most fabulous way to waste time. I now have to work direct with
the web page, since publishing the local copy doesn't seem to work, and ftp doesn't seem
to get me there. It is going to take a while to get back to normal. I MUST do some real
work here. This can't continue using up all my time.
When I save this it will self publish since I am working directoy with the web copy so far
as I can tell. But THAT is very slow, and can't be the way to do this permanently. So we
continue to experiment, and I am weary.
Thursday, Gray Dawn. Well, for a few wonderful hours
it was working, but no longer. For about five minutes this morning I was able to make
contact with the server, but that is gone. Once again I have had it, and once again I face
the prospects of a day wasted trying to make this work. I am also trying to clear up mail.
I did send out mailings to subscribers to keep them up to date on what is going on.
Mail through Earthlink was working, and continued to work.
Thursday, about noon. A router is flapping in Burbank, and that
gives intermediate connections, which get established and things start, then then hang and
time out. This is in the Globe networking system or some such; I wasn't listening too
close to the reasons, because it now appears that the entire universe is in a conspiracy
to make this all impossible. I keep trying. I will keep trying. And it would be nice to
get some real WORK done.
On another front I installed Macromedia Freehand with the hopes of using it to draw
maps for BURNING CITY but I haven't had a chance to do a lot with it. I really need better
MAP DRAWING software and I have not found any. I may be able to develop some techniques
with Freehand. I want to do some rally spiffy maps, because big heroic fantasies that sell
like Robert Jordan does always have good and detailed maps, and I intend to have those for
this book, as well as for THE BURNING TOWER which will follow it.
So long as that router is flapping this is going to be a sometimes thing exercise.
Patience. Only I'd like to go kill something, as the vulture says...
On another front, the Front Page Extensions STILL are not implemented for this
particular site, but they will be Real Soon Now, and then the search mechanism will work.
So I am assured. Orate, fratres...
On the bright side, things do seem to be working. At last. Now I must go out to Fry's
and find some small fans to keep the Pentium III system working properly.
Publish to Front Page begins, and looks normal, but then I run into some undeletable
file out on the web server, and "access is denied." When that happens the whole
thing starts over, 858 files, and it always starts over with the same ones. Clearly until
all this is accomplished I have had it. I have deleted the entire _derived subdirectory on
the local machine, so it cannot try to upload that. Since it doesn't exist. That may be
the solution. It may not. All this is harrying. Meanwhile it tells me the Front Page
Extensions are NOT implemented. This, we hope, will be taken care of later; for the moment
don't sweat the small stuff. Try to get a synchronized local and web copy of this, so that
changes are incremental in future. Apparently creation dates are kept at both ends and
since if you simply copy in the files locally from a CDROM (Darnell did that) the dates
will not be the same? I am not sure what is going on.
Files are transferring. 840 to go. We are on the Linux files now. They have not been
changed but it wants to transfer them. If there is a way to force Front Page to believe
that files need not be transferred I do not know it. I want to leave it running and go to
Fry's. Dare I do that?
No. And as usual it almost works. Almost. But "access is denied" stops things
where they stand. Bah.
Thursday afternoon. As I
expected, nothing is happening that is productive. I am still fooling with this junk.
Look, I KNOW that the right way to change hosts for an internet site is to do it in
parallel. Unfortunately that wasn't possible, for reasons too complex to explain, but
believe me, I KNOW that doing all this on the fly is precisely the wrong way to go. I also
know that most of this stuff doesn't work the way it is supposed to. For example: because
I have been getting these huge lists of files to upload in a "publish" operation
I tried instead to "import" those files, that way doing it in smaller chunks. In
theory it worked. In practice the next "publish" had the same enormous list of
files.
And about halfway through there is some _derived directory that it will try to send to,
gets "access denied", and dies. Nothing is done.
FrontPage is at fault here. FrontPage needs to have its programmers found and beaten
senseless. Front Page needs to have a way to TELL IT NOT TO BOTHER with some files, which
are in fact identical to the ones it is trying to upload for publish. FrontPage needs, in
a word, MORE, not fewer controls and tools, precisely unlike what Cooper's book implies.
I want to be able to tell it not to bother, and not have it dump the job it was doing.
I can't do that.
So I can manage, sort of, lamely, by using ftp rather than publish to update stuff
here. I can't, however, just do what I used to be able to do. In part I think it is
because there are some directories that are not supposed to be up on the web, but are, or
are somehow protected up there. They all start with _ and are such things as _DERIVED and
_vti_cnf the like. I am now emptying them in the local copy. Completely empty them. See if
that does anything. Because it is those that access to is denied.
Meanwhile it insists on transferring the linux files first, then a bunch of others, and
when it hits an access denied, it dies. I don't need the linux files transferred, and
spent a couple of hours IMPORTING them up; they don't need to go up again.
I have emptied the _ directories all but one.
The next publish attempt didn't work either. Access denied when it got to _vti_cnf or
whatever it is. Tricky about access rights indeed. Well, there are more ways to -- I was
about to tell an obscene joke that Ted Sturgeon once told me, a saying of an old boatswain
on one of the cargo ships Ted worked on. "Lads, there's more ways to futter a cat
than to stuff its head in a sea boot," he said. For some odd reason that story stuck
with Ted, and after he told it to me, with me, and you may supply your own verbs if you
want it more accurate. It applies here. There are going to be WAYS to deal with this mess.
For now, it's ftp to send up the newest files.
And tonight is season finale to ER and I am going to watch it.
Later. If you eliminate the _VTI_CNF
directories, the next time you open that web it will create them again. They are needed --
but at the moment when I seek to change one in any way I get "access denied"
which negates all I have been doing. No fun. I'll get to the bottom of this yet, but
apparently I was very lucky last time I did this.
PRAETORIUS, the new Pentium III machine running Windows 2000
has many surprises all pleasant. I installed a Bay Networks $29.00 10/100 Ethernet card a
few minutes ago. It just installs. NO problem at all. Plug and play worked. Amazing! I
have connected FROM Praetorius to other machines. I have not yet discovered how to join
Praetorius to the network so I can get at him, but I make no doubt it's pretty simple.
Everything else was.
I also added a small chip fan to the big heat sink on the Pentium III. I know that
Intel sent it without a fan, but that heat sink --it's Godzilla sized -- gets HOT, and
with a tiny $15 486 fan attached to the heat sink it does not get hot; seems a small price
to pay for peace of mind. The more I see of Windows 2000 the better I like it, and that
Pentium III is FAST. The Intel motherboard has built in sound and video. Add a network
card and the machine is in business. And it's sure fast...
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