17/03/2005-18/03/2005 @01:58:31 ^03:06:01

HELLO AND WELCOME BACK

It's here, the epoch time is 1111111111, and you're looking at my site's new location rjy.ath.cx! It is now hosted on my own connection under a sort of banner which is called troa.ath.cx. Check it out, at last I can do all sorts of crap I've always wanted to do! Hell, this is why I bought caco in the first place!

ChangeLog

As you might have noticed there have been some changes. Here is a list of all the ones I've done I can remember off the top of my head and can be bothered to write down

• There's not one but two sites. Largely to justify squatting on two domain names I made a "network" page (as opposed to a "personal" page) at www.troa.ath.cx. The idea was sort of that I separate my content, which will go here, from my scripts and web applications and things that exist for other people, their sites, etc. as well. For example the tracklist is on this domain but snafu is on the other one. Okay whatever who cares, I'm just probably introducing extra complexity for the hell of it
• NO MORE PHP OH THANK GOD and I don't have to do anything illegal to read the web server logs either ahahaha
• SNAFU has a new look, a new URL and a slightly new backend that runs on a SQLite database. Also if you have a home page that's different from your site page I can make it link your name to your home page. CDave asked for this like two years ago but I told him no, I'd have to put HTML into the data file and it would be a gross hack. It never occurred to me that I could just add an extra column in the table. Oh well.
• There's none of that query string crap going on. You know, all that old question mark p equals pagename shit. However old links should still work for the time being, as Simon has or will have kindly set up an HTTP redirect and I wrote a module with the humorous name TRoA::TrivLegacy to do URL rewriting

Also (having missed getting my site up for its birthday last month I was sort of waiting for this) happily I got another free speed increase from ntl just this evening. In particular instead of having 128kbit of upload I have 200kbit! Hooray, more upload! At last! It's still nothing like a real web server but I'm not hosting much beyond text here so with any luck you won't notice too much. (I've also got 2048kbit down instead of 750kbit. There's some sort of daily limit on this but I've been testing and I never get anywhere near it, so I don't care. You too could get this if you're stuck on ntl. Here are some links: announcement on cable forums (hey I could have got this for my birthday if I'd known about it!!) ntlworld upgrade page ntlworld upgrade page for cable modems (if you have a set-top box it may need replacement) the page where you type your password in to get all this shit)

While we've been off the air I wrote a large number of updates, none of which were actually written on the date they say they were written and most of which I suspect nobody will read. But, here's the links anyway.

• 22/1 Upgrading caco to Debian Sarge, part 1
• 23/1 tmpfs (this is sort of part 1.5, I don't know)
• 25/1 Upgrading caco to Debian Sarge, part 2
• 1/2 Firewalling and traffic shaping part 1. How (not) to write an iptables script.
• 2/2 Firewalling and traffic shaping part 2. How to shape traffic (if you were a retard)
• 12/2 Bunch of Doom maps
• 14/2 "Oops I missed my site anniversary. Fuck it. Here's some more Doom maps I've played"
• 27/2 Having too much to drink and randomised misogyny. Site stuff.
• 28/2 YET MORE DOOM STUFF OH GOD ISN'T IT GREAT
• 1/3 My firewall versus a well-known port scanner. Some crappy maps that should never have been made
• 9/3 A domain name and a dartboard come out of nowhere!
• 11/3 Random crap I don't have a clue about!
• 16/3 More reasons why firefox is shit and hurts people's web servers. Please read this, it's important.

Finally these are the things I still have to do

• Put my MP3s back up! And a few other pages that are "missing", although its likely I won't bother. Who needs a FAQ and a contact information page anyway? I might steal the idea of Errant's TALK TO ME page though. But on the other hand I am and always have been loathed to provide any way you shitheads can post your crap on my site. So who can say?
• Go through the old updates replacing links. I should be able to do with with a well-chosen perl -pi -e if I'm careful
• Improve the server configuration, the way all the perl modules fit together etc. It's pretty good but it could be better
• Make a few small pictures and maybe a background image for troa.ath.cx, it's pretty dull at the moment in spite of stealing that blue colour off of Something Awful that I've grown to like a lot
• Improve SNAFU beyond belief. It needs a better way to check if pages have changed, for one thing, since some people are either not able or not willing to implement Last-Modified headers in their site code. Also it still needs to be customisable, but since that means processing user input I'm still reluctant.
• Find a way round SQLite's insistence on having write permission for the parent directory of a database. Okay if I'm modifying a database file I obviously need write permission on the database file itself but why does the parent directory need to be writeable? It creates temporary files in proper temporary directories after all.
• Implement some other stuff I'm not telling you about yet!!

Enjoy!