The State of Things
The cubes are still on fire, which was my term for the systems crash yesterday that my boss actually incorporated into a casual e-mail within the office. The Turkey file shows a size of 32,768 bytes, which is a pretty good warning you’re dealing with a placeholder.
I almost wish the thought of Linode hadn’t resurfaced yesterday, because now I’m jonesing to open up an account. I think it would be quite premature to do so (wasteful, not enough time right now to get it going right, Sigma should still probably be run locally for now, etc.).
The more I think about Sigma, the more I see opportunity for a totally stupid yet awesome feature: an inbuilt web server with system status and possibly even online mapping, etc. You could even do OLC (On-Line Creation, if that’s a Circle-specific term) with the right security and stuff. Security and cookie management and stuff could be handled by a lightweight web framework like web.py. Apache could proxy over to some high four digit port to the Python server to keep a solid server on the user-facing side.
Python could just pipe to Dot on the shell for diagramming, which would pretty much be turnkey mapping with the right setup. Of course, if Dot isn’t found that feature goes away passively. This is how Doxygen and I think some part of MediaWiki work for diagramming, in principle.
Dot and I are good friends, because it’s definitely a component of the reason I ended up in Turkey. People still don’t understand how I could generate diagrams on the fly, even after I explained that there is a programming language for it!
Of course, the Circle —> Sigma world file converter is the priority, and honestly it will be a cinch once I really get to it. The Circle area files are really primitive, and half of the features Circle has I don’t think we care about. So, lots of ignored fields.
I need to go ahead and get the Sony set up as a development machine, which will really ease my coding process. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the machine but I keep wanting to refresh the OS again. I don’t know why. This mentally prevents me from getting Python set up.