Kevin Reid's blog

A machine I used to use to host some web services, bots, and repositories became no longer accessible from the Internet, as a result of which I've had to move what I was serving from it; some to switchb.org, some to personal machines.

I took the opportunity to clean things up a bit, as a result of which I now have better backups, more polished services, and know a little bit more about configuring Apache — though not as much as I perhaps should.

• My Subversion repositories are now served over HTTP, and therefore browsable; and they are now backed up daily (using svnsync triggered by a cron job) to my laptop, and thence to all its backups.

  (I wasted several minutes on remembering that cron will ignore the last line of a crontab file if it doesn't end with a newline; after listening to me grumbling about this, someone made a suggestion to end the file with a comment, so that the last line is harmless whether ignored or not, and also reminds one of the issue.)

  If you have a working copy of one of my repositories (E-on-CL, E-on-JavaScript, MudWalker, Den, etc.), here's a guide to the changed URLs.

• My other Tahoe-LAFS volunteer grid storage node is now residing on a machine on my home LAN.

• Finally, some simple data-querying web services I wrote for Waterpoint's word games have now been moved to switchb.org; I also took the time to prettify their URLs (no cgi-bin or .cgi) and write documentation.

I haven't yet gotten to working on the bots, darcs repositories, or miscellaneous other stuff I had there.

(Pondering moving my blog over to switchb.org as well so as to not have ads, especially now that I found I can still have LJ-friends by way of OpenID. (Hm, but reading friends-locked posts over RSS might not work since there's no username+password for LJ to accept. Anyone have experience with that situation?))

Apache configuration questions:

1. If I have multiple variants of a document (e.g. foo.html foo.pdf foo.txt) handled by MultiViews, so the canonical URL of the document is extensionless (“foo”), how do I properly control the default variant to serve in the event that the client does not express a preference via the Accept header? (Without doing so, I found that it would serve the .txt version, whereas I would prefer the HTML.) All that I found that worked was to create a type map file named “foo” with quality values, and force it to be interpreted as a type map using <FilesMatch>. This seems kludgy to me.
2. What is the right way to serve CGIs, not in a designated cgi-bin directory, and without any .cgi extension in the URL? I initially tried to apply mod_rewrite, but I couldn't get it to work such that /foo internally contacted foo.cgi whereas /foo.cgi redirected to /foo. I resorted to another <FilesMatch> explicitly listing the name of each CGI and doing SetHandler cgi-script.
3. What is the right way to handle “testing” vs. “deployment” configurations, where the relevant Directory, Location, etc may be different depending on which server or subdirectory the site is set up on? I see that one may use environment variables — should I just set up variables containing the path prefixes for the particular host before including the generic configuration file?

Both of the non-internet-based computer-related classes I'm taking this semester are (only offered as) once-per-week night classes, nominally ending at 9:30. So I'm talking with someone after class — — gee, it's bedtime already.

Late update on Caja-CapTP:

Google Summer of Code is over. I passed based on revised goals, but I'm not happy with the state of the code and I did not complete any significant part of the original plan.

Regarding the items mentioned in my last update:

• Write more documentation/comments.
• Commit as much of the work-in-progress as I can.
  • ...including the incomplete CapTPConnection, even though its tests don't pass yet, so that the partial work can be counted.

I committed CapTPConnection, and found and fixed enough infrastructure (whenResolved, CommTable, SwissTable, deSubgraphKit, etc.) bugs that it starts up and can do a basic operation or two. It's not useful for anything, but it's a lot closer to running than it was at the time of my last update.

Also, I removed dependencies on 'window' so in principle it will operate on a non-browser (server) JavaScript implementation. This has not been exercised because there is no browserless driver for the test scripts yet.

I stated that I would continue working on Caja-CapTP past the GSoC work period; however, with the time occupied by schoolwork, I have not had time or brain space to do so yet. I am not going to abandon the project.

As I wrote before, I am currently attending MVCC, a two-year college, and need to choose a college to transfer to (for a bachelor’s in computer science).

So, tell me what college(s) I ought to consider.

(I have of course also heard the advice that it doesn’t matter that much, but I've got to choose from some short-list...)

I am willing to consider any location in the contiguous US, but have been looking mostly at New York choices as a way to make the research list manageably short.

I am not looking for vocational training; I can learn this year’s or last year’s hot technologies just fine by myself, thank you. I’m looking for general education (“well-rounding”, shall we say), useful theory, and practice in thinking. I wish to avoid a high-pressure or competitive academic environment. Also, at MVCC, I have greatly appreciated the instructors’ approachability, availability, and even willingness to acknowledge mistakes.

Outside of education, I am particularly interested in there being social opportunities for the socially awkward; chances to talk to like-minded people (i.e. total geeks), and opportunities to talk to unlike-minded people (for the practice!).

Please give me your recommendations. Just a name, your personal experience, comments on others’ recommendations, whatever info you’d like to share.

(On the other hand entirely, I’d also consider going directly from MVCC to a full-time job given the right opportunity. This will be the topic of an upcoming post.)

I have moved my web site to a new location: http://switchb.org/kpreid/.

I have done this because Apple has announced they are shutting down homepage.mac.com. While they offer a replacement, I do not want to have to change my URLs ever again, so I bought a domain name.

As well as moving the files I have updated my picture, changed some of the URL layout, updated some miscellaneous information, added an “About me” section for the front page, and fixed broken external links. Please let me know if I missed anything...

or even just critique it without respect to what's new.

I have been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2009!

Up until now, I've pretty much had an Online Life and an Offline Life (not much of one), and not made any connections between them. It's time to change that.

I'm 25, and my current phase of the Standard Life Plan, in which I am running a bit late, is “college”. I am currently attending Mohawk Valley Community College in New York, and planning to transfer to a four-year school, with the goal of a bachelor's degree in computer science.

It's taken me far too long to get around to posting this. A short todo list of further items:

1. Update my web site.
2. Post about transfer.
3. Post about employment.

(One of the reasons for this post is to provide context for if I later post something related to schoolwork; another is getting around to the third item on this list.)