Category: Geek

It’s a small thing, but it took me by surprise — I’ve run a web server of some flavor from home for the past five years. Now that the box is in a colo, the router lights at home stay solid most of the time — no activity. I wasn’t even aware of it, but I had subconsciously learned to see those lights in my peripheral vision, to be subtly aware of the stream of visitors — the network of unknown friends blinking into and out of the office. Strange, but it feels a little bit lonely tonight in here.

Long stretches of time pass at work where I feel I’m work work working on things that never see the light of day — projects that end up waiting for someone else’s bits, or priorities shift, or… Today actually launched two projects that have been in lengthy germination.

Course schedules and descriptions have always been done in Word / Excel and then exported to ghastly spaghetti HTML (and PDF) for public consumption. Steps then taken to clean up code and add links. Every time there was a change, all that had to be redone. An ongoing battle last year I vowed to fix. This summer I databased all the course details, prof bios, etc. and built a PHP front-end for it. Descriptions too. The back-end was the larger project, but you can’t see that. No more Office docs, no more spinning wheels with menial conversion work.

The Knight Foundation funded a distance-learning site for mid-career journalists wanting to improve their multimedia reporting skills. So we produced a series of software and equipment tutorials and packaged them up with a course on multimedia reporting. There’s more there than meets the eye. We still consider it a work in progress, but good enough for jazz (I hate what that phrase says about jazz, but it sure rolls off the tongue nicely).

All options exhausted — DSL too slow, Comcast seals off port 80, and we’re just outside range for 5.8GHz microwave. So colo it is. Scored a healthy G4 off craigslist and used Carbon Copy Cloner to image birdhouse hosting onto it, so our mail and web server is finally on a dedicated box. Transition went flawlessly. I’ll let it run for a week here to break it in, then haul it up to fortress geek (most likely) to ride on their T1. If anyone can suggest other East Bay colos, I’m all ears.

The XServe arrived at the J-School today. Sysadmin is out of town, so it gets to live in my office for a while, bootstrap it through the transition from Wintel. Surprisingly large. Surprisingly loud. A work of art. Packed with software, ready to rock. In the rack. Dancing blue lights on the front of the box monitor dual CPU activity, which I haven’t seen since the BeBox went bye-bye. Afternoon spent RTFM’ing and exploring config options. Tomorrow we get down.

Speakeasy’s max allowable distance from the C.O. is 15,000 feet. Our new house is 14,600. Line speed drops with distance, so we’re on the outer limit for acceptable DSL service. Jacked in yesterday (no phone jack in new office, ethernet across the kitchen floor for now) and was pleasantly surprised – very snappy and we might have gotten lucky. Still need to do careful upstream testing — if too slow, will have to rethink birdhouse hosting. Three possibilities to solve: home T1, put server in colo, drop the business altogether. There had to be a gremlin in the bush.

Historically, students send their resumes to the jschool. Assistants key them into Quark for a publication called the “facebook.” Then other assistants copy resumes out of Quark and into Dreamweaver, format them manually, and post to the web. Time and energy wasted in every direction. I’ve been building a web-based database that lets students input their own resumes. The database will then feed both Quark and the student resumes portion of the site. Because a lot of this will be pasting out of MS Word, had to deal with the smart/curly quotes problem.

Took a while to figure out that the quotes were represented by HTML entities #8220; and #8221. “Smart” dashes were 8211. The final solution looked like this:

$foo = str_replace(“&#8220”, “\””, $bar);

Repeat for right quote and smart dash, for each affected variable. Also set up browser-based image uploading, so students can upload their own faces.