News You Can Bruise

My project has been accepted as a CodeCon presentation! I was thinking of sending it to PyCon but that's all the way in DC, and CodeCon is just across town. I've given up on the idea of making money from the project, but maybe once I release it and it gets publicity people will stop saying "Oh, it sure would be nice if this existed" and take the idea away from me and start improving it. The only question is, will my army of androids be ready in time?

I wrote a piece of software that is really neat. I think it's in the top quartile of the class of application that people could have turned into software companies back in 1999. I don't know anything about starting software companies, and it's not 1999, but I still think there's some way to make money off of it. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to distribute it even if I give up hopes of monetary gain. I'm hoping my readers can help.

My original plan was I would host it and let people have accounts on it, but as it turns out, it requires a lot of processing time to keep one user happy. (I have optimized this a lot but it's still pretty high.) I can't host it for more than ten or twenty people without buying a dedicated server, and a dedicated server will probably only let me go up to a couple hundred users. I don't want to enter the realm of running dedicated servers because that means the project has taken over my life, and unless it's my actual job to run the project I don't like that.

That's the one option. Now, this is a piece of software that sometimes reads other people's web pages. If somehow I got it all set up and everyone in the world were using it, it would use up about as much of your average web page author's bandwidth as, say, Technorati does. This I could live with. On the other hand, if I gave it out as open source and n people ran their own instances of it, it would be like creating n/k Technoratis for some fairly large k. If n got bigger than k I would have unleashed a monster upon the world. A monster! Usually you can count on nobody caring about the software you release, but I don't want to take that risk. The people I've shown this to really like it.

My current inclination is to just write a paper detailing all my secrets and making this someone else's problem, or at least making me look like a visionary when someone else comes up with the same idea. My ideal outcome would be selling the idea and the current implementation to someone, where I get some money up front and they make a lot more money by setting up servers and taking subscriptions and generally letting the project take over their life. I know that's not likely to happen. What's the next best option?

A mystery begins now. Details later.

The unexplained. The surreal. The shadowy realms beyond the explanatory power of science. But enough of that. I finally got access to the old (> 1 week ago) Crummy data, and copied everything over, though a heavy dose of directives which could not be processed remain, and the NewsBruiser archives have yet to be brought up to date. I'm working on a slightly better infrastructure for the site, using my newfound knowledge of and access to Apache configuration. I'm generally distracting myself from the fact that I'm still (or maybe again) in a rut.

I want to get my game (which I last mentioned, let alone worked on, about 9 months ago) finished before the end of this year. I am somewhat distressed to, for the first time in my life, be thinking "Well, that's going to take more than a year," and even more distressed not to be feeling that that year represents a large chunk of my life.

My only hope for actually finishing the game on schedule, or at all, is that Leo will make Inform programming a non-hassle (I have a huge problem finding things and cross-referencing related parts of Inform code, and I think Leo will help), reinvigorating my jaded palate.

I was skimming through The Book of Lost Tales, looking, for reasons which need not concern us at the moment, to find historical names that orcs might give their children. It turns out that The Book of Lost Tales contains no orcs and very few orc role models, so I'm using The Silmarillion instead. However, The Book of Lost Tales does contain a cool Lost Tale about an enormous whale named Uin, who is hitched up to a continent and tows the entire continent elsewhere, much like in this Penny Arcade cartoon. I tried to find out more about Uin but there is no more, except that Uin appears in a children's book Tolkien wrote called Roverandom.

No, I didn't either. It looks like a fun Phantom Tollbooth-ish yarn, and Uin's part in it is generally well-received by the critics. I'm thinking of getting it and reviewing it here.

New song, started and in honor of around this time last year: Three Years Ahead of the Japanese

Game update: I have a title, plot and (lame) cosmology for my game. I know how a couple of the puzzles will work (because I already wrote code for them). I have an interesting main character for whom I will enjoy writing interior monologue. I'm feeling some ennui about the project in general but I think it will dissipate once a few more pieces fall into place and I start writing code.