Paul's Journal

I couldn’t think of a good title for this post, but earlier today i had watched a bunch of Celebrity Jeopardy from SNL.

Also got a good quote from my english prof this morning:

I agree completely! English sucks. Everyone should talk to each other in Java (hey, that would be cool, a completely cross culture language. As long as Sun wants to port it and then license binaries )


The written english language is dreadful. Its a horrible mesh of old and new words, with rules that don’t any sense. It needs some serious refactoring.

Heading back to home to Spokane next for Thanksgiving break. It will be good to see the whole family again. Im guessing everyone at Cyan won’t be working the days I am there. But I should try to hook up with some of them.

The Apache HTTPd Devel Mailing list has been on fire for the past couple days.

Much of the discussion started out of the lack of major development for Apache 2.0, and the lack of overall deployment.


Some how the idea of opening the 1.3 tree to increased development came up. I think any attempt to increase the status of Apache 1.3 beyond maintance only is a very bad idea. Doing that will only split an already small group of developers into two different camps.

Rasmus, the creator of PHP also made a comment:

Frankly, most humans are not programers. I think that threadsafe code is not that difficult to write, and the performance gains can be signifigant in Apache’s case. Maybe I am just angry at the PHP developers FUD about Apache 2


Part of the problem I see in Apache Development is lack of a clear direction. For example the ROADMAP file hasn’t been updated in over 1 year. What Apache needs is an updated plan on where to go from here. Opening 1.3 up for development is not the solution to that.




In other news, my mod_authn_cache module is coming along well. LDAP Cache that I was basing the shared memory caching on is completely broken so I changed to the
SSL Hash Table Cache. Has anyone made a bug free Shared memory Cache for Apache? If they have, Google hasn’t helped me finding one.

Also got a Patch to add SHA1 support to apr_password_validate applied. I feel special. I got the lucky prize for the day!


Besides all the bullshit going on at dev@httpd today, everything was going fairly good untill i tried updating the mod-auth website. Of course the SourceForge.net Shell Servers are down, and there is no ETA. Welp that Sucks. I think I will just goto bed now.

A shout out to Ian Holsman(dead site?) for providing me with the basis for the mod_authn_pop3 module.

I was reading the Binary Cloud website last night, and came upon their incomplete documentation. One part that struck me as important was the discussion on the design of URIs.

I must admit, I have done the good, the bad, and the ugly before. But it doesn’t have to be this way. I think from now on I am commited to always be in the good.

Earlier today I started on a tool to monitor the schools 100 odd printers. They want to keep track of toner ussage and maintance on all the printers. After some hacking around with the Printer MIB RFC I was able to get the toner levels from all the HP printers on campus. I still haven’t got the Lexmarks reporting properly.



Now, I think its totaly cool to have all the Info that SNMP can provide. For example I use it with MRTG for the box in my dorm room. But SNMP sucks. Seriously. OIDs seem like a good idea at first, and its cool that companies can easily extend them, but god damn they are a PITA to work with.



Hey, but my PHP based printer monitor should be cool once its all done

I was reading through mod_auth_digest today and found an odd comment:

/* XXX: WHAT IS THIS CONSTANT? */
t.time = 42;

I didn’t understand what it mean at all. I looked in the Digest RFC, looked in the Squid Proxies implmentarion of Digest and couldn’t figure it out.

I figured it out a couple hours later. 42 is the The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The Wikipedia has some nice info about it: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Answer_to_Life,_the_Universe,_and_Everything
Some Apache coders crack me up.

Also found out that Carroll is hiring a “Nicole Swan” to work as a dedicated Coder for the Carroll Website.
Her blog is over at http://www.nicoleswan.com/

Hopefully she is pretty good with PHP. It sounds like we will get todo a complete site redesign from scatch soon. Should solve many of the problems that the site currently has.