Adding a little polish and a big drive
Last evening I realized that I really didn't like the fact that from the Journal pages you couldn't get back to sparky's home page. Clearly, this is a UI problem, so I decided to add a menu bar at the top of all the pages to make it easier to navigate. The first version of this was to have the non-current pages appear in the menu bar. I didn't like this because it meant that the menu kept changing - which is bad form, I think. Then it hit me... have the current page appear in-place in a different color. This works very nicely. I can tell where I am and can get to every other place easily. Very nice addition to the site.
This afternoon I finally received the cable I purchased through eBay that converts 50-pin SCSI to 68-pin SCSI so that I can cable from sparky's CD-ROM to the 36GB Quantum Atlas IV external drive that I also purchased through eBay. When I had all the components I needed, I powered off sparky and went about adding in the drive.
It's pretty straight-forward, but I had forgotten that after I run format to partition the drive, I needed to run newfs to make the UFS file system. Oh, I knew I needed to run something to make the filesystem, but I had forgotten the command. A few hits on the man pages, and I found it. Nice, that Unix... Anyway, it took a little bit but I got everything moved around like I wanted. Basically, this new 36GB drive is /usr/local where I have almost all of the stuff that's continuing to grow - the apache site(s), the PostgreSQL databases, etc. So now they have so much room to grow it isn't even funny. Also, I've freed up a lot of space on /usr so it's not crowded any longer.
If I need it, I can certainly move my development directory to /usr/local/development with a link back to my home because most of the development stuff is tools and libraries - not code that I'm actively developing. Nice plan, if I need it. Right now, I've got plenty of room on all partitions and that's good enough for me.
I've also done some more CIA runs today for Joel. They are taking a lot more time than I had originally hoped. The latest run took 2002 sec. or about 33 min. 22 sec. That's not even remotely close to responsive even if we assume a six-fold increase in processing speed - which I doubt we'll get from the web hoster Joel's signed up with. So... it means that we are going to have to have an asynchronous method of operation. Something where the pictures/images are submitted, and processed, and later the results are generated and available for delivery/pick-up.
I'm thinking that this may not be such a bad idea... what if we made it such that you needed our client to send in the image and specific information that you, the user, have to provide to make it work. Then, we get a little help on the local end and also control who gets into our system. Just an idea... chances are, it'll still be better if we can keep away from any client-side utilities.
UPDATE: I ended up making a /usr/local/src and moving all the canned source out of my Development directory to that location. Now I've freed up a lot of space on the 4.5GB drive that is /user and put all the sources in a very reasonable place. Kudos, dude.