October 2005 Archives

Google had their Summer of Code, I just had my...

Weekend... Of... CODE

(Say it like The Muppet Show's "Pigs In Space.")

It's been kind of nice, really. First of all, I enhanced the way gig images are viewed over at the Sons Of Nothing site. Instead of images opening up in a new browser window when you clicked on a thumbnail, the images will open up "inside" the site along with some handy "next image" and "previous image" navigation.

It wasn't hard. Just create a new template for the full-size image page and give it some meta data about the next and previous images in the set. Done.

Perl, mod_perl, and Template Toolkit just rock... like Sons Of Nothing rocks... but different.

For example, check out this recently-posted rare glimpse of me from our September jaunt to Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Secondly, Iodynamics is currently involved in a project for a client that involves gluing a bunch of facilities together within one website including auctions, weblogs, news articles, file downloads, and more. Call in the next 20 minutes and you'll also get this handy dandy nosehair trimmer.

Anyway, the original project specification had us doing everything in PHP - not our first choice for anything. We weren't too worried about spending too much time writing PHP code because our plan was to use "off-the-shelf" components or applications and glue them together into one seamless website.

It never quite works that way, does it?

The "RSS feed" we were supposed to be using for the news articles turned out to be an XML format which borrowed haphazardly from RSS, but is completely different, thereby requiring some ground-up parser development.

The file download repository is specific enough, we hadn't been able to find anything that would do the trick admirably enough.

Oh, did I mention the client was seriously hoping to have it all done last week?

Fortunately, the client succumbed and said, "Go ahead and do it in Perl." Whatever it takes, just get it done quick. Man, after searching for something akin to CPAN's XML::Simple for PHP, it was so refreshing to be able to just use versatile Perl modules like XML::Simple, LWP::UserAgent, DBI, and others.

I was able to crank out all kinds of magic to do the news articles and the file download repository in an amazingly small amount of code and still maintain a strict separation of concerns (i.e. MVC) -- something that you have to work really hard to do when programming with PHP.

Server upgrades haven't been so smooth lately. We've been upgrading the Iodynamics core servers to Fedora Core 4, but it just seems like every upgrade we do something goes wrong.

Today, for example, Adam and I are upgrading what is, perhaps, the most essential server for the company: castro. I decided we should upgrade some hardware while we're at it and maybe that was a bad move on my part. Maybe we should have stuck with the hardware that had been working fine.

It's raining outside.

Anyway, we threw in a new motherboard and CPU and started the reinstall process with FC4. As soon as the drive formatting was complete and the install was about to start... Kernel panic. It happened every time.

The panic message said something about journalling. That indicates to me there's a problem with the kernel's interaction with the ext3 filesystems on the hard disks. Very strange considering the hard disks have been running fine.

Adam and I thought maybe the problem was due to bad memory (which was also odd considering the memory was also in the previous motherboard). We ran a memory test regardless. No errors.

The CPU temperature was pretty high: 85° C. The fan was seated well and turning when the system was turned on. The heatsink was getting real hot. Very weird.

I just sent Adam to a local computer store to get two new hard drives, more RAM, some thermal goo, and possibly a new fan. We'll see how it turns out.

(Time passes.)

Adam returned. We attached the new hard drives (SATA drives to replace the aging PATA drives) and the motherboard's onboard SATA controller BIOS won't POST. We tried EVERYTHING to get that SATA BIOS to POST and it wouldn't. We even used a USB keychain drive to update the BIOS on the motherboard, but that didn't seem to affect anything (i.e. it was already running the latest and greatest BIOS.)

So. Adam set out again... this time, to our office, to get yet-another motherboard -- one that we know works because Adam's been using it in his workstation at the office.

It's been nearly five hours since we started. Hopefully, this will be the last hurdle.