.htanswer

I wondered recently how I would go about mirroring the configuration files in my homedir on my HTTP server, whilst retaining the homedir paths in the backend and presenting prettier URIs on the frontend. Thanks to a huge hint from DrBacchus (Apache dude Rich Bowen), I managed to get it going with the following simple recipe:

RewriteRule ^emacs$ .emacs [PT,E=REDIR:1]
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_REDIR} !1
RewriteRule ^\.emacs$ /directory/emacs [R]

Part of the weirdness here is that using env.cgi, which prints out the environment variables, as a reference test, I noticed that actually [E=REDIR:1] gets passed through as REDIRECT_REDIRECT_REDIR; but then Apache only requires REDIRECT_REDIR to pick it up. In any case, it works now.

In other news, oh I guess there isn't really much in the way of other news. I missed the opportunity to make an April Fools Day Post of Awesomeness, but on the other hand I don't much like the holiday anyway. I've been meaning to compile a list of important days of the year that I can celebrate for random reasons, because taking notice of that sort of thing seems wholesome, and is a good mnemonic for remembering what day it is. I remember that when I started using my day symbols, I was suddenly able to figure out which day of the week it was at any given moment a fair bit easier.

I'd like to start working on some more What Planet essays, but I wonder if I've exhausted the range of topics that I cover. Though I did find that once I chose a seed topic, the exploration of writing the post is what produced the most material, so it's not really valid to say beforehand that I haven't got any more decent material, especially since the previous few posts contained some cracking stuff. I still often reference or find new interesting material surrounding Origins of a Pronoun, for example. But there again I did reuse or expose a lot of material that I'd been working on previous to that, or explore a lot of ideas that I'd had over quite a period of time. Part of the aim of What Planet is to make little, barely important antiquarian discoveries; and though they may be small and barely important, there has to be some actual content there, and I suppose I'm currently lacking the power to generate ideas that are rife for that.

On the other hand, I'm making good progess in the anomalous lights department, so I suppose it's balancing out. And researching anomalous lights is actually a lot more difficult that researching random What Planet posts.