http://blog.nanowrimo.org/blog/3 en http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/23 <p>Every year Chris and I have a talk about the scramblers.</p> <p>According to Chris (and I believe him) there are a lot of people out there in NaNoLand who are worried about shielding their works from plagiarism, and making sure that no potential publisher will feel that anything uploaded to www.nanowrimo.org counts as a first publication.</p> <p>Unfortunately, to become an official NaNoWriMo winner, you have to upload your novel (or something!) to the word count validator.</p> <p>What gets uploaded to the validator gets saved as file in a temporary folder on the server. After the counting, the temporary file is deleted. The novel has a very brief life as a temporary file on the server.</p> <p>However, someone <i>could</i>, I suppose, find a way to access the temp folder and copy stuff at just the right time. Or someone <i>could</i>, I suppose, not believe my explanation about the very brief life of the very temporary files.</p> <p>And that's fine! No one should have to believe me just to win NaNoWriMo. And that's why, every year, we post the best instructions we can about how to scramble your novel before uploading it to the validator.</p> <p>These instructions are long and kind of complicated and are a pain to execute. Every year I lobby for shorter, more concise instructions. Every year Chris lobbies for a magical, cross-platform, completely safe and user-friendly document scrambler that we can provide for people so that we don't need instructions at all.</p> <p>As far as I know, there is no such beast. Normal encryption software won't do - we need to preserve the white space between charaters! ROT-13 is too easy.</p> <p>So I'm blogging for advice - does anyone know of any good Windows, Mac, or online tools for scrambling eggs the way we need them scrambled around here?</p> <p><img src="/files/images/2455_Scrambled_Eggs_1.jpg" alt="Scrambed Eggs" title="Scrambed Eggs" class="image preview" height="259" width="401"></p> <br class="clear" /> http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/23#comment Sun, 10 Sep 2006 22:05:21 -0700 Russell Uman 23 at http://blog.nanowrimo.org http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/14 <p>We ran a 10k last weekend. We've been running for about a month. It's creepy actually. I have a crazy friend who decided to run a marathon for no reason (or maybe to get in shape for his high school reunion). He dragged a bunch of us along with him (I'm running a half - I don't think I feel the need to ever run more than that at once). So we started running, in the mornings, which is something I would not normally do. Ever. But it's been really easy. Shockingly easy. Suddenly it seems like a perfectly normal thing to do.</p> <p>Is NaNoWriMo like that for anyone? I still haven't been able to win. My personal NaNoWriMo begins some time in July when I start working on new features and fixes in earnest. It continues through the end of November, although it's gotten better each year as things break less, and I get better at patching the leaks.</p> <p><span class="inline left"><img src="http://www.nanowrimo.org/blog/files/images/big_corn.jpg" alt="Big Corn: It's a big, beautiful ear of corn." title="Big Corn: It's a big, beautiful ear of corn." class="image preview"></span></p> <p>I'm hoping that at some point NaNo becomes obvious and natural for me for no good reason.</p> <p>This ear of corn is also a metaphor for NaNoWriMo, I think...</p> <br class="clear" /> http://blog.nanowrimo.org/node/14#comment Tue, 8 Aug 2006 17:16:56 -0700 Russell Uman 14 at http://blog.nanowrimo.org