Server Plan

Here's the plan as of Saturday, February 14, 2004

Where's the server heading???

That's always a tough question. Here's why... The server revolves around my interests and stuff that I'm doing or have time to do. Sure, after learning more about the web, I'd love to do a bunch of things. As for the near future, here's some goals:

1) Improve performance in a few spots. A new guestbook is on the way (I'm lazy, a while back I designed the database tables and wrote some PHP code, and the dust is still settling). I've already thought about a new counter, I'll see about putting one in to help eliminate some of the bogus hits from virus-probes. There are a few modifications I can make to the site news, but until that proves a bottleneck (i.e. page hits in the 100s/hour [in my dreams]), there's no need.

Update (10/23/03): - The statistics pages need a little help in the form of pre-processing of files and relying on past results rather than re-parsing the whole history of the server. It might even be prudent to utilize a database to store the results and then just query the database. In this case, I might switch to Perl for dealing with the log files because it's much easier to connect to the database from Perl versus Java. Another area that has recieved some improvement has been the old news section. The update there was mostly to help keep the page-size down due to my dial-up limitations.

2) Unify the back-end. This one is pretty much done. I took the time to move everything to PHP or to C++ and only use Java in spots where extra security is needed for things like reading strings (string/memory functions in C/C++ are the primary source of buffer-related security vulnerabilities). Of course, there would be some transition work if I every get a new machine (which would run Linux).

Update (10/23/03): - GCC 3.x on Cygwin has finally fixed some of the funky linking issues that were causing files to be 45 KB bigger than they needed to be. It's still about 2-3 KB bigger than the good ole days, but that's something I'm more willing to live with.

3) Keep the site evolving. The site has essentially served a purpose as my programming outlet. As I see new things that I'd like to try, I use the site to let me do it. Here are some possible things that my find there way to the site...

• XML (specifically RSS) - This could be useful when grabbing news feeds from slashdot or other places (blogs, maybe) or even creating my own feed!
• Perl 6 - I've been following the Perl 6 internals mailing list for about a year. Although I'm not tuned-in enough to contribute, it's been interesting to watch the development of a flexible virtual machine/run-time environment that will be capable of handling the wackiness of Perl along with any other language that the "powers-that-be" write a Parrot byte-code compiler for.
• .Net - There's some new life here because of the Mono Project. There's even a possibility for using ASP.Net under Apache!!! The mod_mono module isn't yet compilable for Windows, but it can't be that far off. The only other nice thing would be some freely and easily accessible C# documentation.
• DHTML - This is a logical move since there's already a solid foundation of CSS being used on the site. I'm not too shabby when it comes to JavaScript, so at some point, I'll probably throw some DHTML out on the site.