Paul’s Journal

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.