Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

I would recommend seeing “House of the Flying Daggers”, although it is not quite as good as “Hero”. The story centers around a small regional army patrol chasing after a renegate group called “House of the Flying Daggers”. The group is wanted by the government because they have been stealing from the rich and giving the money to the poor (a la “Robin Hood”). The story takes place during the decline of the Tang Dynasty in China circa 859 BC.

The story is very well written but you don’t have the sense that you are watching a grand epic (like in “Hero”). One of the reasons for this is that there is no huge battle scene in the movie. The biggest battle is about 30 people against 2. Despite this, there is some great cinematography and the sets and costumes are great.

Zhang Ziyi is excellent as a member of the “House of Flying Daggers” who infiltrates a dance troupe. The fight sequences evoke memories of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and focus almost exclusively on sword play. This is a very good movie which doesn’t give you too much gratuitous violence and sex. I give this movie 8 out of 10 stars.

Today I spent a good amount of time checking out the Linux server used by our company. We have just configured the server to host about 30 different e-mail accounts and found that some users are having trouble receiving and sending mail.

After perusing the logs for a while, I noticed that users weren’t using the correct username when logging in. This explained why they weren’t able to receive mail. As far as sending, I saw a mysterious error in the logs that read “CNAME_lookup_failed_temporarily.”.

This turns out to be a deficiency in QMail which attempts to do a DNS lookup on the recipient address to make sure that the address being sent to is valid. Only problem is, it queries the entire DNS record, not just the CNAME record to workaround a bug in CNAME lookups. I found that installing “dnscache” should fix this problem so I installed it and hope this will do the trick. I see you have all fallen asleep after reading this mindless drivel… sorry about that.

Today is the deadline for a major project I have here at work. I am hurriedly putting together all of the items necessary to launch. I just hope that there aren’t any major issues once this puppy is launched.

In order to make sure I meet this deadline, I have been working late the past few days. I don’t think it has really helped much because I didn’t seem to get anything done during the extra time. It would’ve helped me to get done sooner if I had a nicely defined specification of what needs to be done.

I just learned today that another one of my “co-irkers” is going to be leaving us at the end of this week. I wonder if my managers will bother to find a replacement for her. In the past, they have neglected to replace those IT employees who quit or were fired. More importantly, I wonder who is going to have to take over her responsibilities once she’s gone!

Today, I launched a re-vamped version of the Linux resource site: Linux Docs. I really didn’t do much work in re-building the site. I lost a lot of valuable code on the old site due to a hacker who exploited a vulnerability in my phpBB forum software which is why I needed to re-build the site.

So the new site is running Wiki software which allows for collaborative content management. Wiki is web authoring software originally created by Ward Cunningham who based his software on the old HyperCard software for Macintosh. Since them, Wikis have been very popular with the most popular one being WikiPedia. In addition to this, I also added the excellent Phorum software to run very simple discussions on the site.

Since I don’t have time to update the content on the site myself, the Wiki solution is about the only solution that will work. If you visit the site, you will notice that there is almost no content on there right now. This is because I had no “real” content on the old site except for HTML version of the man pages. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyways) - It’s going to take a while before the site becomes useful for Linux users. I have learned a lot from Linux and this is my way of giving something back.

A lot of people have been posting about how blogs have become so popular. A recent poll estimates that 8% of Internet users have their own blog (and there are an estimated 8 million blogs being published). At the same time, only 38% of Internet users know what a “blog” actually is.

Blog seems to be taking on bigger importance and is even seeking to challenge traditional media. Many people are getting stories from blogs instead of reading traditional news stories found in magazines or newspapers. Of course the big media giants are trying to fight this because it basically takes money away from them. The less readership they have, the less advertising revenues they will see.

Big media conglomerates are trying to discredit blog writers and the stories they post. What we are seeing on the Internet is nothing less than an online revolution. As computers become more and more prevalent throughout society, people will be free to post stories however they like and readers can get their information directly from the source. Right now, stories from big media have to go through a lot of filters like editors who decide what’s fit-to-print and what is not.

Read the story: Blog Reading explodes in America to find out more.

Oh yeah, by the way, today is my 36th birthday. I celebrated yesterday at my parents house. My Mom cooked the most wonderful dinner: chicken tamales, beans, corn, rice and chicken. For dessert, we had coconut cake, chocolate cake and mint chocolate chip ice cream. Yeah, we really pigged out last night.

For my birthday I got a lot of warm clothes, some heavy duty bags for holding tools and the The Simpsons 5th season DVD set. I can sure put those to good use.

Next week will be my daughter’s birthday … she will be turning 5 and starting school this year. I can’t believe how fast she has grown up.

So I’m here at work trying to finish up a project that is due by Wednesday. I have been putting this project off as long as I can and now it is finally crunch time. I need to get this project done and working properly because my whole job could depend upon it.

So I am trying to work with code another person wrote, and I don’t really have a well-defined task description but I am managing to get everything up and running OK. It’s hard to work with someone else’s code when our company doesn’t have a policy of good coding practices, code review or unit testing.

I am having to re-organize and clean up code that someone else has written just so I can understand how the code works. There is little-to-no commenting in the scripts and it is very difficult to follow. Generally, we try to have the person who wrote the code maintain and update the code, but it’s not always possible. The reason why it’s not always possible is because my company has a high turnover rate and most of the people who wrote the original code have since quit.

It is really sad to see that a lot of the relief supplies have arrived in Indonesia and they don’t have the capability to transport the supplies to where they are needed. Since all of the roads are destroyed, the only way they can transport supplies is by helicopter.

A similar story about a small island off the coast of India says that they haven’t received any aid as of Jan 1st and the survivors there are pretty angry about it. It’s too bad we can’t donate to a charity that would supply helicopters to the remote areas affected by the tragedy.

Still, there is a lot of good news coming from the area. It’s good to see that people have responded so well to this tragedy in order to help those poor unfortunate people. I am considering sending another donation in soon. I’m glad to see that people across the country (and world) have donated so graciously to the victims.

Currently, I am working on a script that will convert an ASP web script into a PHP script. My company is seriously considering moving all of our servers to a Unix environment. While we could just go out and buy an ASP processor for Unix (like Sun’s), I think it would be better to use PHP since it is a much more powerful scripting language.

So I have started writing a script that will do some intelligent search-and-replace using regular expressions. Right now I have about 100 regular expressions written and it is quite slow in processing a single script. I really should have used a parsing tool such as Lex and Yacc to do an efficient processing of the source script.

I chose a script instead because I am more familiar with that and it eliminates the time-consuming process of writing conversion routines in C. Right now it seems like I will never be able to get this thing perfected 100%, but 99% would be really good right now. This could be a very useful tool that I might be able to sell to .other web site developers.

Happy New Year everybody! I hope that everyone had a safe and happy New Years celebration last night. We didn’t really celebrate here, although I was awake when the clock struck midnight. It was just that I was about to doze off to sleep.

This point marks the half-way point through the decade. This decade has really been a remarkable decade, but mostly because of all of the bad things that have happened. And it has not just been limited to our country either, a lot of countries around the world have seen similar problems.

I saw someone on TV last night and they were commenting on how it is hard to celebrate with all of the trouble going on in the world. They asked one man what he is hoping for in the new year and he said “a win in Iraq”. I’m not quite sure what would constitute a “win” over there. In fact, I don’t believe there are ever any winners in a war, there are only survivors.