Wootopia.net

Yesterday, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto perished as a result of a suicide attack, along with at least 20 others, at a rally. Bhutto was on the campaign trail, campaigning for the Pakistan People’s Party. Unfortunately, I recieve conflicting reports from the US media as to her exact status in this campaign - on the one hand, I’m hearing that she was a popular figure, widely liked by moderates; and at the same time that her previous administrations were very corrupt, and her influence was much greater outside of Pakistan than within it. While there there is evidently some despute as to the exact cause of her death, that this was a targeted attack against her seems clear. The question the rest of the world is asking itself is, “What’s next?”

The elections are scheduled for January 8th. Given that Pakistan had just emerged from a state of martial law imposed by President Musharraf, it may be the case that elections will be moved back, or martial law may be redeclared. Bhutto had evidently contacted CNN’s Wolf Blitzer shortly before the contact via email, indicating her belief that were she to be assassinated, she thought the finger should be pointed at Musharraf, for failing to provide adequate security.

Given the largest concern for the rest of the world is probably going to be maintaining the stability of Pakistan and (more cynically) the nation’s nuclear arsenal, Musharraf may be able to once again play the “I’m keeping the peace, and the nukes out of the hands of radical Islamists” card and maintain his grip on power. While my suspicion is that current reporting is correct; that radical Islamists (who may or may not have any al-Qaeda ties) were responsible for the attack, Musharraf will no doubt milk this for all it’s worth. Various doomsday scenarios are being argued about on the internet, the most colorful involving a civil war which allows nukes to fall into some unspecified terrorist group’s hands, allowing the civil war to spill into a regional and perhaps global conflict.

On the other hand, I’m simply an American observer, who has little experience with the internal affairs of Pakistan. Let me instead direct you to www.nadirs.com - run by a Pakistani colleague of mine; he’ll doubtlessly have far more intelligent things to say on the matter than I - and perhaps much of the media - will.

My condolences to the families of Benazir Bhutto and the others who died in the attack.

Forums are up. Galleries are next on my plate, but I’m thinking it would be very useful to have shell access to the site first. I theoretically have it, but can’t log in for some reason - may need to review the docs my hosting company sent me initially; or may need to fire them an email…

I’d like to talk about about how this website came to be. I can tell you that yes, Christmas day 2007 I downloaded some PHP files, tweaked them, then uploaded them to my hosting company, blah blah blah. While that would be factual and accurate, it doesn’t explain what is to me – and hopefully, you – the more interesting question of “Why?” I’ve made some of the choices I’ve made with this site.

I guess you could say I’m a tinkerer, who often ends up building things that no one else is interested in.

This is a story about my experiences with web development.

My first experience doing web development would have come sometime in, if I recall correctly, 1997. I was an AOL user at the time, and wanted a website, so I built one with the help of AOL’s web tools and a mid-90’s vintage NCSA Beginner’s Guide to HTML. I did the initial layout with AOL’s tools, but read and made myself understand the NCSA guide so that I could open the files in Notepad and fine-tune them myself. I was proud of the fact that I understood every line of those (by today’s standards) horribly primitive HTML files.

Well, all the lines except one: the one that created the chatroom! Yes, I had a chatroom integrated into my website, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I had no idea how it worked, except I pasted some magic formula into my HTML and a chatroom appeared on one of my webpages. Naturally, I tried to get all of my AOL and IRC buddies interested in my TOTALLY SLICK web chatroom.

It didn’t happen. My AOL buddies thought it was pretty rad that I had this chatroom, but hey, why not just hang out in AOL chatrooms? Let me show you this neat proggie I have that lets people in the room play hangman…

The IRC buddies were even less impressed. Yeah, we could hang out in your chatroom, but we have this cool IRC bot which holds the channel for us and kicks/bans anyone we don’t like, and…

So I had my little chatroom, and there would be times when I would log into it, still logged into IRC and AOL in other windows, and sit there. Alone. Yep. I’ve got a chatroom. I’m here, alone. In my chatroom. Which is awesome. So very alone.

Work on my website stopped in the spring of 1998; I was about to graduate high school and move on to college, which would start a whole new adventure in web development for me.

Incidentally, that old website is still operational, and although the engine behind it has clearly changed, the chatroom still works. And no, I don’t want to link to it…

That’s where I’m going to stop with my story for tonight – more stories chronicling my failures as a web developer, and by extension, my failures as a human being will be forthcoming.

First post! This is the first post on what will hopefully end up being a very interesting adventure…