I got an e-mail from Eddie over at BetaNews asking me whether I got hacked and pointing me to the Nortiq mirror – various scenarios flashed through my mind and I thought of all possible ways that the security on the site could have been compromised and somebody could have got in and defaced the site. But then I went over there and realized that I’d done the hacking myself :p I’d been testing changes to the sub-folder code that I’d made to Blog yesterday since the ability to specify relative paths didn’t help those who had a different FTP root than a WWW root. This was because I’d assumed that though they had a different FTP root, they’d still be in the WWW root when they logged on via FTP and had done my code that way … Turns out that was wrong and so I took out the relative path code and went back to using absolute paths but added code to give the image path as a relative path if it was a sub-folder of the journal directory.

Anyway, I did some testing of that code and the early attempts failed a couple of times to change directories properly. My testing was being done on the Nortiq server in a test folder but during one of the instances where the folder changing didn’t work, I guess the root directory’s default file got overwritten and had the test posts I’d made – which included a cartoon :p Hopefully, things should go back to normal when I upload this entry …

I completed the last Raymond E. Feist book in my collection yesterday. I’d first started reading Feist in 1990 with his “Magician” and then had read “Silverthorn” in the same year or soon after. I had to wait a while to get my hands on “Darkness at Sethanon” but I believe I’d read his “Faerie Tale” in the meantime. I’d collected quite a few of his books over the years but hadn’t read any more till this year. Since I came back, I’ve read his post-Riftwar books, his Serpentwar Saga as well as the Riftwar Legacy series. Most of the books are about the magical world of Midkemia and one thing to be said about Feist is that he writes extremely interesting characters and that he knows how to keep your attention (yes, I know, that’s two things <g>) I’ve seen the world of Midkemia and its characters evolve and change through the books and do actually agree with how the conDoin family sort of degenerates through the generations to the level they are represented in the Serpentwar Saga (the Riftwar Legacy is set before even though it was published later …) The conDoin family starts of as heroes, they become kings and the first generations we meet are extremely able, intelligent and heroic. The next generation (Arutha’s sons Borric, Earland, Nicholoas etc.) are still responsible and heroic but not as capable as their fathers and the generation after (Patrick, Borric’s son) is so used to the fact that he’s royalty that he behaves like a perfect git and is usually prone to temper tantrums. I think that’s a very realistic portrayal of the evolution of the conDoin family and now probably should talking about them since probably not more than one or two people realize what the heck I’m talking about :p

Anyway, now that I’ve finished the last Feist in my collection, I want to read more and to complete my Feist collection at the same time since I still don’t have a copy of “Magician”. So I’ll probably update my wishlist sometime today to include the latest Feist paperbacks (I really don’t like hardcover …) as well as the older ones that I don’t own. The wishlist is on the sidebar and if some kind individual would like to get me a couple of those books, that’d make me very happy 🙂 It’s a pity that Amazon UK doesn’t have a wishlist (at least they didn’t the last time I checked …) I like the UK edition covers much better than the US editions – I don’t know what’s up with the marketers in the US but they seem to think that good looking covers equate to books that people won’t buy. Wonder how they came up with that daft idea?