It was a hell of a day. We managed to document most of Unlib — much more work than we thought — and made considerable progress on the content management part of our latest project. We also busted some phat riffs on Dave’s synth. The result: (computer) science is the winner.
Archive for July, 2006
The Duel: Part II
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006The Duel: Part I
Wednesday, July 5th, 2006Today Dave and I are going head-to-head to see who can finish the most active tickets by the end of the day. On my plate:
- Release Unlib
- Release Snooze
- Release update to Instaweb
- And a few other things that are confidential
Dave’s stuff is all confidential, so I can’t list them here. Check back in 8 hours to see who wins the duel!
mod_authz_svn versus htpasswd
Tuesday, July 4th, 2006mod_authz_svn files have commas separating members of a group, but htpasswd files don’t. Don’t spend an hour wondering why your Subversion configuration isn’t working because of this difference.
More on the Pre-registration Project
Monday, July 3rd, 2006Time for a bit more detail on the
pre-registration project.
A bit of background: at QMUL, student
information is held by the central Registry, but
each School is responsible for collecting that
information and verifying it. The old system
collected all the information on paper. This
information has to be checked for correctness (is
the student’s name spelled correctly; are they on
the right degree programme; have they registred
for the correct units?) before being typed up and
sent on. With a thousand students you can imagine
how much work this is during the short
registration period at the beginning of the
semester.
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We’ve created an online replacement for the old
system. Using a variety of information sources
we’ve uploaded information on students, staff,
programmes, and courses. Students are assigned to
members of staff who act as their advisors, and
are responsible for editing their registration
information. Certain members of staff are capable
of editing the other information we store,
including programme and course descriptions. In
effect we’ve created a complete custom content
management system for all information related to
registration. The School is very happy with the
result, and so are we.
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As we mentioned before, the site runs on PLT
Scheme and SQLite, with Apache forwarding to the
PLT web server. We use the
version of PLT Scheme. Memory consumption seems
stable at around 200MB. We don’t have any
impressive uptime stats to report as we’ve been
updating our PLT Scheme installation quite
regularly which neccesitates bringing down the web
server (current uptime is about a day). Peak load
is modest; there are about 40 advisors who will be
using the site at any one time. So far our
highest daily load has been about a thousand hits.
Last I checked we had about 20K lines of code. It
has probably increased since.
width="437" height="164"/>Development has been interesting. We’ve run
into two bugs in the PLT web server (both fixed),
and found a way to reliably make SQLite crash
(also now fixed). Oh yeah, and we’ve
our server flooded. We will be releasing some
of our libraries as open-source as we get time to
clean them up. Look for Unlib, our utility
library, Snooze, our persistence manager, and
Lylux, our web framework, at a
you.
Finally, we made the claim “This is, to
our knowledge, first large site to run the PLT
Scheme web server continuously for any length of
time”. There are at least two other prior
contenders for the crown:
Matthews, who puts the science back into
speed-dating, and Shriram Krishnamurthi et al with