There's this bit of code I wrote many years ago, based on Tom Christiansen's old Magic: the Gathering search engine. Mine was targeted at a different WotC product, Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (formerly called Jyhad, and now owned and maintained by White Wolf, the original authors of the source material it was based on). Now, the code isn't my best work, and the worst part was that a sudden and extreme shortage of round tuits kept me from (a) finishing a user-friendly (or at least not-so-user-surly) interface, and (b) getting proper permission for copyrighted graphics and text and such as a precursor to making it publically available.
Of course, I've known for some time that what I really needed to do was some serious re-engineering, possibly even a ground-up rewrite. But Laziness is the first characteristing in the great triumvirate, so I never took up the effort.
Then a month or so back, White Wolf released a new expansion for the game, which introduced a great raft of new mechanics. So much so, that I realized I could not integrate the new cards into the existing engine at all. Oh, I could, but I'd have to ignore some very significant attributes on many of the cards. So I came to the grudging conclusion that I would have to push() this task onto my stack (whereas my recent decision to accept the chance to work on a book resulted in a task added to the list by means of unshift()). So fine, I'll have to do that. Sometime.
Saturday night, I happened to go looking for some of the graphics files that were a part of the original package. They're gone. Along with the original code. Seems that when I recently had to replace a failing hard drive, I didn't quite get everything off of it like I thought. And this particular "project" managed to stay beneath my CVS radar. So, any illusions I may have had about cutting corners and shoe-horning the new material on top of the old have been gracefully swept aside.
I may still have copies of the files on my old, retired laptop. So all may not (yet) be lost. But if the Grand Universal Force had wanted to tell me to just start the project from scratch, there were much more subtle ways of getting the message across.
--rjray
Nice to see you pop in Randy!
Tom Christiansen's MtG stuff
pne on 2002-02-28T14:38:15
I have a.tar.gz lying around my home hard drive somewhere that has a bunch of MoxPerl stuff in it... I haven't looked at it for ages and don't remember whether it's just a description of the cards or whether the search engine is there, too.
If you want and if it'll help you, I can take a look (though I'll probably have to wait until my computer works again). Drop me a line if you're interested.Re:Tom Christiansen's MtG stuff
chaoticset on 2002-02-28T15:44:24
Absolutely. My contact info is, uh, on my info page.:\ No hurry at all -- it's not something I could even begin to work on soon, but in the long run, I'd like to have a look at it.
