A few days ago, I mistakenly untarred a large bunch of files into my home directory. I tried to delete the files by piping the output of a listing to xargs rm -r... I had a bit too much success. The first entry in the list was '.', and a significant chunk of my home directory was deleted...
I was working on a system intended to compete with BobTHJ's Agora-tracking database, and had completed a large chunk of functionality before the incident. It looked like this: A web page amounted to a simple email client; two panes, on the left a list of public messages, on the right the message view, and a text box to edit the message's effects. The main script was written in Python, and evaluated the gamestate by starting at a base state, then going through each message sequentially and running its associated code. For, say, economic actions, the associated code would be an idiomatic snippet to harvest a crop or transfer a currency or whatever. For a rules change, the associated code would load a new version of the relevant module(s). Thus, in theory, all platonic actions would be tracked through the system; if the success of an action was ambiguous, you could simply comment or uncomment the action, have all future actions recalculated and get a current report. The usefulness of this might be limited in practice, but I think it's a very interesting goal. More practically, as in this system you would recordkeep an action by going to the specific message and noting its effects, responsibilities could be divided in time rather than space. Rather than having an IBA recordkeepor and an AAA recordkeepor and so on, anyone involved could take care of the outstanding messages, avoiding duplicate work... Anyway, it wasn't complete, and the system may well have been overambitious-- might have collapsed under its own weight-- but losing the data before I could even try it out sucks. And I really don't feel like rewriting it all, so I'm giving up on economic automation for now. -- -c.
