What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I looked to see the status of AOL's blockage of the Oscar protocol from GAIM. As it turns out, there aren't a lot of issues left, but as AOL finds a bug in libfaim that doesn't break their client, they exploit it. As one would expect, they are working hard to find as many bugs as possible in libfaim. However, the authors know that and they are busy taking care of them. It's an interesting problem. At some point AOL is going to have to just let go and forget about it. It's a loosing battle fighting reverse engineers... they have your product, can see what it's doing, and have the benefit of being able to architecture the best system to mimic that behavior.

Anyway... I downloaded the latest GAIM and will build and install it to see if the Oscar protocol works. If not, I'll use TOC until a release does work and then stick with that.

Big interview today... gotta stay frosty...

Now that I've moved out two machines from the office, I needed to spend a little bit of time getting the global services that they served back on-line. Thankfully, it only took an hour or two to get the DNS changes propogated around the world, and I was easily able to redirect The Man from S.P.U.D. home page to barney. Nice that Irix handles DHCP as easily as it does. Well... so does Solaris and Linux, so I guess that's not too terribly surprising.

In any case, I had to move some services around and that didn't take too long. I was slightly disappointed that Apache on barney and sparky didn't default to using the extended API, which would have allowed me to easily compile mod_ssl, but that's not too terribly bad either. When I get another fast Linux machine in to replace tux I'll have it do the SSL stuff, and serve the main Man from S.P.U.D. page. In any case, it would have been nice, but it's not a serious problem.

I've emailed the ISP for Leslie again as she's getting ready to go live with the eCommerce site I created for her. We'll see if he comes around or if we have to move the site to another hosting company. On that note, I got the site into CVS before the move of services just to be safe. It's nice to have it under CVS as I feel much more secure and on good solid footings for this.

Tomorrow is an important interview with Bear Stearns in Chicago - hope it goes well...

Today is an historic day for me. I've decommissioned tux to be removed from my office. He's been an incredible asset to me and I will certainly miss him. However, there are other folks that need him more, and he's off to be re-tasked for some greater purpose. I'm sure that whereever he goes, a little bit of me will be with him. I will certainly miss him.

This does give me a chance to significantly reduce the noise in my office and I will take this opportunity to do so. When I replace tux it'll probably be for another high-end Linux box and hopefully that will be soon. Until then, I'm one machine down.

At the same time, I had to ship off peabody... I've got another NT machine, and I don't use it much these days anyway. Mark off another from the office.

You've gotta wonder who's running the store at AT&T @Home now that they've bought MediaOne, my cable modem provider. I want them to keep my old MediaOne email address as a forwarding mailbox to the new @Home address. This is very simple to do and costs them absolutely nothing. In fact, it's allow them to move me without my knowledge and then tell me that I have some period of time to use the new mailbox. Very clean. Very simple.

I have absolutely no confidence that they will do such a thing. They are, after all, AT&T.

The plan I've formulated for this problem is to get a domain for just the family. Good enough to use for my business email as well as for Liza and the kids. Liza and I threw a bunch of ideas out, and I checked all of them against the registry database and found a few that are OK, but none that are really stellar. We were totally surprised that some of our best names were taken - even those that I can't believe were taken. It was, and is, really surprising.

So first I need to register the domain and then I need to point it to a web hoster like WebPipe and move the pages from AT&T/MediaOne to the hoster. This way I don't have to worry about email or web site ever again. That will be a relief. But first we need a good name for the family...

Today I did almost nothing other than to design an icon on Irix for AbiWord. I wanted to help the SGI Freeware guys a little, and when I think I can do an icon for a program, I usually do and send them the files. It's nothing special, but it's what I try to do to help.

But then I had to deal with the ISP for CellAnalysis. What a goofy bunch of guys. I tell them to get the code for FFTW and build it. There are a lot of optimizations that are done in the build to get the fastest implementation possible on the target hardware. It's a good thing to so. They didn't. They got a set of RPM libraries, which didn't include the header files. So I can't build and they have to go back to find the right RPM with the includes. What a goofy situation.

I need something else to do... I'm waiting for people to do things and I need to keep my mind busy so I don't think about the job search.

UPDATE: - they installed the headers after I asked for them. Then I was able to build CIA with the FFT smoothing of the sample data. I emailed Joel to let him know that I'd done this, and what still didn't work at CellAnalysis (no PNG headers -> no PNG output from Ploticus) but that's not critical at this point. In the end, they got it right.

This morning I got another email from Leslie at North Hollow Farm and she's really excited about the site. I'm glad. I think it looks nice, and it's certainly clean and functional. Well... good news. One of the interesting parts of the site is that when an order is placed, it's mailed off to Leslie's email account so that she knows everything she needs to know to get the order started. Nice and clean.

I have asked Cydian once already about getting PHP4 and PostgreSQL on one of their servers, but I'll need to ping them again today about that. If they fall down on this, I know that webPipe.net has both of these in a wonderful package that's about $20/mo. - about what they're paying now. So, here's to hoping that they come around soon and we can move this site into production as soon as possible for Leslie.

On another front, the SGI Freeware site has released their May collection, and it's as impressive an update as I've ever seen. New versions fo GNOME, GTK, PostgreSQL, OpenSSH, and a ton of others make this a must have, and long overdue series of updates. I know it'll take some time to get them all downloaded and installed, but that's OK... it'll be worth it.

It's times like this that I think I'd like to have much higher performance SGI hardware and problems that need that power. Problems like my old thesis work, supercompuer-level stuff... something that I could really challenge a machine and my mind at. While I like doing things like this web site for Leslie, it's not the same as trying to solve the electron and hole populations in a III-V semiconductor... and that's really what I wish I could be doing. Unfortunately, I have no ideas for those problems, or I'd likely be trying to solve them on the hardware I have. Too bad... I guess I'll keep searching and hope something turns up.

I also spent some time today trying to get mod_ssl working on tux. I'm convinced that I got the library to compile correctly, but I had a really hard time getting it configured properly. Now I didn't do a lot of planning on this, mainly because I just didn't care that much about it. I wanted to just get an HTTPS: server up so I can test on it. But it seems that while I'm getting close, I'm not close enough. Maybe I'll come back to this later, but it seems as though I'm through the compiling part, and into the difficult configuration part.

UPDATE: - I've done searching on the net and I'm still not convinced that I'm any closer to getting SSL working. Oh sure, I've figured out how to get the certificates and generate my own certificate authority, but I still seem to be unable to get Apache to answer on port 443 - the SSL port. While I think it's quite possible that I'm just not getting the right information from the net, I also know that I'm not as concerned about getting it. I don't have to have SSL on tux - though it would be nice. Maybe I'll do a little more searching tomorrow and see if I run across something that might work.

Yahoo! I got it! I am in the middle of a late-night downloading session for barney so I decided to do a few searches to see if I could find the right stuff. Well... as it turned out I got a complete httpd.conf file and it showed me what I was doing right, and what I still needed to do to get it to work. Thanks for the examples! Now I have it and all is looking good. I now can test the https: links and see how that works into the North Hollow Farm eCommerce site.

Today I spent some time migrating the CIA Uploading and processing code to PHP 4.04pl1 because there were differences that I hadn't taken into account in 4.04, and I wanted to get the code working again as Joel was having so much trouble getting his PHP code to work. So I did it. I haven't liked that BMP files don't display properly in Netscape, but that's another story - and in fact, I created a wonderful work-around in CIA that solves yet another problem - BMP file size.

You see, the original scripts planned on having only JPEG files. But they are lossy and BMPs are not. So CIA can read either and convert from one to another. So if you give CIA a BMP file it will generate a JPEG file so that the scripts can use it for presentation. The fact is that JPEGs are a lot smaller than BMPs, so even if they send a BMP we want to show them a JPEG. It'll display faster, and that's important.

So now no matter what is uploaded, a JPEG is generated for viewing purposes. This is a good step forward. Additionally, the comment Joel made about problems in PHP 4.04pl1 are not true - at least not generally true. I have use the PHP 4.04pl1 source and built it and it shows no signs of adding additional lines to the beginning of a file. None at all.

On the syrup front, it looks like my cousin will be going with Online Merchant Gold a package that does a complete eCommerce site for you for a nominal set-up fee and a recurring $70/mo with 4.95% of each sale. This is a reasonable set-up because it offers the Certificate and SSL which would be at least $35/mo and then there's the support you get and the database and software.... so it's a reasonable deal. They do all the card processing sending you orders and checks. Sounds nice.

I also got the easyDNS working with my domain TheManFromSPUD.com and converted all my machines to this new domain name. Very nice to have everything more stable and working well. I haven't tried sendmail, but now that I have DNS, I'll be able to do that if I so choose.

I've also taken the time to update all the web pages to remove the IP addresses and put in the machine names with the domain so I don't have to worry about updating those pages if/when the IP addresses from MediaOne change. I have to say that this is one of the better things I've done in the office for a while. It's nice and clean and cheap, and it's great to know that people can find my machines no matter where they are. Cool!

UPDATE: there's another eCommerce solution that Leslie is considering. Their present web hoster has a simple eCommerce option that might just do the trick. She's checking into it to see how they do card processing and shipping, but it sounds pretty interesting for the price.

Yesterday I received yet another notice about an ISP that allowed MySQL/PHP/Apache services, but not PostgreSQL. I wanted to find out what I didn't know about MySQL so I started looking into it on barney which has it installed.

Well... I certainly know why they like it. The entire database is file-based. This makes for easy accounting - doesn't it. Since an ISP wants to limit the entire diskspace per client, it makes sense that a database that's file-based is a good thing. Well... the fact is, PostgreSQL is also file-based, but the ownership of the files is that of the process running the database. Is it possible to still calculate the total used space? Yes. But it's more difficult, that's true. So now it's clear why. Let's see what it costs us.

PostgreSQL is very much like any of the high-end commercial packages. Here are a few things that MySQL doesn't have that PostgreSQL does:

• Foreign Keys - this is almost hard to believe. They even say in their documentation that this is a good thing as FKs are difficult to deal with. Now I'm no database snob, but I can't believe that anyone who maintains business critical data thinks this. FKs are the key to referential integrity and without that you have no guarantees that the data you have is related to the key components for it's understanding. Imagine an order item with $1,000 without an order to go with it? Do you assume it's bad data, or do you try and find the customer that's missing a $1,000 item, or find where your receivables are? This is the kind of thinking that I simply can't believe they didn't do.
• Stored Procedures - if you can parse SQL - which they do, then you should be able to parse scripts. If you can do that you can handle stored procedures. There's nothing to it. While it may not be the most efficient language to use, a few additions to straight SQL make it very reasonable for SPs. I'm really amazed that they don't consider this to be a useful addition. But looking at their attitude towards FKs, this doesn't surprise me.
• Transactions - for a database to be SQL-based, I'm amazed that such a fundamental concept can be thoughtfully left out. While I can certainly understand that there are plenty of applications that don't need transactions, there really aren't many that are business critical that don't. This then places the target market for MySQL squarely at the web server, text logs, non-business critical database market. There really isn't any other way to look at all these omissions other than to realize that there is a different market for this database.
• Triggers - this is a little easier to believe because a lot has to go into handling triggers. You ought to have a transaction to have a trigger so you can roll it back if the trigger senses that something's gone wrong.

Combine this with the fact that PostgreSQL is every bit as fast as MySQL and you're in the position of choosing a solid, complete database versus a table/record database. I can't even image why someone you willingly choose MySQL. I can understand why certain shops don't offer PostgreSQL, but that may be as much education as anything else. We'll have to see.

I got word from the ISP for North Hollow Farm that the account was set up for the shopping cart experience. I went and checked it out. I also checked into the UPS tools like address verification, time tracking and package pricing and services. There is good news and bad news about each, I'm afraid.

Most importantly, the shopping cart is reasonably well done with just enough customization to be nice, while still making it wasy for a new person to use. This will be important because there's a lot of data to load/type in, and while I can physically do it, she might as well do it because she knows it, and the maintenance practice will do her good. The bad news is that the order flow is fixed, and there's no way to interject the UPS tools into the flow if they aren't done by the software manufacturer. This isn't really surprising to me, but it's unfortunate.

On the UPS software, even if we could have interrupted the order flow, there's a problem with the UPS tools that I hadn't counted on - XML. The documentation said that the tools were available in HTML and XML forms, but that's only true for the most simplistic of tools. If we needed to address verification or time tracking, then we'd have to have XML, and that means CGI at least, and that's a server configuration issue. Not a pretty sight, I promise you. So... it's probably just as well that the order flow can't be modified - I'm not sure we could have modified it anyway.

This brings me to an idea... I wonder if I should just do it myself and then see how it compares. The issue really isn't anything other than what's best for Leslie. I can't really do card processing, but I can get an interface and try... I haven't done SSL/HTTPS, but I can find out about it and try... I guess it comes down to having the time to try versus doing something else.

I think I'll wait and see what Leslie says. Depending on me for code is not necessarily in her best interests.

Late last night I got an email from Joel about problems he was having running CIA on the ISP's servers. So I called him this morning and tried to track down the problem. Well... there are a bunch of problems with this ISP. First, my account on the server is not put in the PostgreSQL database - and it needs to be so I can test the code. Also, I cannot see the contents of the /www/cell/webapp/ROOT/ directory where all the PHP files and the links to cia are maintained. Also, Joel cannot execute cia which is puzzeling because I've properly set up the permissions on the executables and even run them myself. But since I don't have access to the database, I can't test what Joel, or the web server, are trying to do. And since Joel can't execute the code he can't tell me what's wrong either.

So... the ISP needs to put me in the database as a user and also figure out why I can't see the /www/cell/webapp/ROOT/ directory. When those are cleared up I should be able to run the code and see what problems might be there. Then we can go about figuring out why Joel can't run the code. Lots to do, and it doesn't help that there seems to be so poor communication between the ISP and Joel, but that's life.

Another thing that happened this morning was really nice. I got an email back from Leslie, my cousin Mike's wife in VT. I had emailed them about getting some syrup because I've finally tired of the store-bought kind, and mentioned that if they were interested in setting up an eCommerce site for the farm, I'd be glad to help. And so she emailed back with their problems and I went about trying to track down solutions.

The first problem is getting a general eCommerce Shopping Site up. This is pretty easy these days for the Farm as their selection is fixed and doesn't occupy more than a page. I went to Freshmeat and did a serach on shopping systems. I got more than 40 - some Perl-based, others PHP... some used MySQL, others PostgreSQL, still others used files. In the end there certainly looks like there's more than enough to pick from. We need to know the capabilities of the ISP they're using to know which one(s) will work in their installation, so I've asked Leslie to check on it for me.

Her second concern was UPS shipping. When they ship meat - which they do a lot, they need it to arrive in a very timely fashion as it is not frozen. So if someone orders from Boston, it can go UPS Ground, but if the order is from California, then it needs to go Next Day. Thankfully, UPS has a series of free tools available on their eCommerce web site. They tend to work in concert with one another and can be used either by HTTP or by XML. UPS seems to have gone to a great deal of trouble to make these tools easily available to the eCommerce web site builders, and I am impressed. They have a tool that verifies the city, state and zip for correctness, and then another that calculates the shipping time for different shipping methods from the source to the destination. This is exactly what Leslie needs. She can get the city, state and zip from the web site, and then pass that to UPS for verification, and then get the shipping times and see what ones are really available to the customer. Then that can be integrated into the order and away we go.

I have to admit that I'm really interested in helping Mike out on this. I know it isn't much, but it's nice when we can reach out and help family. I mailed off all this info to Leslie and we'll see what she comes back with. I can build this all on tux or sparky and then when the time comes I can ship it to their ISP for deployment. It sounds pretty nice.

UPDATE: I exchanged a few more emails with Leslie and it looks like their ISP has an eCommerce option with database support and credit card processing. For $50/mo this might be their best option and I let them know about it. If I used their ISP and wanted me to put an eCommerce site on it, I'll have to stick with Perl/CGI and forgo any database. I mentioned this to her, and suggested that it might become necessary to move the site to another ISP that supports PHP/PostgreSQL/etc. for less than $50/mo.

This morning I decided to move tux from the ISDN network to the Cable Modem network. Since this was a move from static IP addressing to DHCP, I expected a few problems and planned for it to take me most of the day to get it right. I was very pleased to see that Linux had pump which handles the DHCP client tasks quite nicely. When I created an /etc/pump.conf with a set of very simple, reasonable defaults, things went along quite nicely. Within a few short minutes the NIC was reconfigured and running quite nicely on the DHCP address.

Then came the task of converting all the defaults and settings that went along with the old network. Not brain surgery, but a lot of little details - NTP, proxies, etc. all had to be reconfigured for the new network. At the same time I moved my Toshiba Portege 3015 to behind the NAT/firewall so that there would still only be four machines on the Cable Modem network. That was very simple as I maintained the DHCP configuration.

So inside of an hour I had reconfigured the networks to move tux to the outside world. You can jump to him here. Good tools make work easy.

This evening I spent some time working up the initial The Man from S.P.U.D. homepage. I spent a lot of time on the graphics, and I think it shows. The text is a little weak, but even that's not bad. I think it'll do nicely as a web page. I wanted to keep it simple and short. Nothing fancy, and easily viewed on all browsers. Nice work.