Xen (by alaric)

I'm seriously considering becoming a big user of Xen. As in, making all of my servers run Xen (with NetBSD as the host OS), with everything of import then running in Xen "domains" (virtual servers) beneath.

There's a number of advantages to this. Read more »

Eyes (by alaric)

When I was quite young (5 or so?) I remember having conjunctivitis - rather vividly, since it involved my eyes being stuck shut in the mornings and having to be cleaned out by my mother before I could open them. And, alas, I have it again; this morning, my wife had to clean my eyes up before I could see...

So when I could see well enough, we went and got this 'eye ointment' stuff that she had to put in my eyes (holding me down as she did it!), and afterwards, my eyes felt very sensitive so I sat there for some time with them closed.

This brought to mind a long-running area of interest of mine, which is the design of computer interfaces that are usable to the blind. I only see usefully with one eye anyway, so if anything should happen to the other eye, my career in software development will rather depend on such software...

DDOS Attack – why the Salaric Shops not Working (by sarah)

Mew :'(

The reason that my shop has not been working - is that Cafe Press are experiancing a Targeted Distrabuted Denial of Service!

This is bad especially at christmas - those of you that managed to actually view the site I'd linked to may have seen the complete hash of it, that occured becuase I was trying to add a section when the service went 'intermittent'. I have not been able to go and change it as my site isnt up long enough to do so!

But at least I have that much access many have none at all. I am lucky in that this is not my main source of income - infact I have yet to make any money from it at all, but for many it is their livily hood - not to mention the Cafe Press people themselves.

As they cannot get any information out like credit card numbers I woundered why someone would bother with this unless they hated a site - what I've found out makes me sad.

ie someone out there must be using lots of computers to target the server(s) to bring it down - their are two other reasons I can think of why someone would do this - ones blackmail - ie pay us or we wont stop doing this or to destroy a competitor just as you launch! Internet businesses have fickle customers - if the site is down you go and find another!

Mew mew mew 🙁

Going Live! (by alaric)

It's not often that I get to actually write about my work other than tangentially, since it's usually somebody's trade secret, but for a long time now I've been doing the technical architecture and some of the programming for an actual publically viewable web site; and it's been under wraps during development, but now the site is soft-launching, I can start telling people about it.

The implementation of Web applications (by alaric)

I first started Web app development in PHP in 1998. Although PHP as a programming language has many, many, shortfalls, the fundamental model - take an HTML file, change its file extension to bring it to the attention of the PHP module, then stick bits of code in where needed - was great... for the kinds of pages that are the results of simple GET requests; idempotent data-gathering. Code that's purely functional, at least macroscopically.

However, once you started bringing forms beyond search boxes into the mix, things started to go downhill. This first struck me when I had to develop a series of pages that allowed people to register domain names. At the time, this required gathering four sets of contact details (legal registrant, administrative contact, billing contact, and technical contact), along with some technical details. Since, most of the time, all of these sets of contact details would be one and the same, it was decided that we'd start off with a page with a form for the legal registrant's details, and this would have a "Next" button leading to a page with a form for the administrative contact's details, plus a button that would invoke Javascript to fill the form with the legal registrant's details so they could be submitted as-is or modified slightly (perhaps a different person's name, at the same company and postal address), then submitted with a "Next" button that led to the next set of contact details, this time with buttons to prefill with the legal registrant's details or, if they differed, the administrative contact's details. And so on.

And, of course, there was validation; any of these "Next" buttons might well instead bring you back to the page you just came from, with an error flagged, rather than to the next page.