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Finally, the new site is in good enough shape that it can be made available. If you're not familiar with all that has been going on with development, let me bring you up to date. Earlier this year, it became obvious that morons.org needed a rewrite, and in April I procured a rackmount box from eracks. It's a nifty little AMD 1500XP box, gig of RAM, and a couple 40 gig hard drives. I like the eracks box, except it had a frustrating heat problem for a while. AMDs run pretty hot, and there wasn't adequate air circulation in the case... heat would build up after a time, and the box would crash. This would happen especially if the sun were to shine on the case. For any of your AMD rackmount needs, I recommend getting one of these little flat AOC slot blowers. They fit into an expansion slot and blow about 42CFM out the back of your case.
The new machine, named "turing" after the well-known computer scientist Alan Turing is now housed at a colocation facility operated by United Layer in San Francisco. If you're looking for inexpensive but quality colocation, please allow me to recommend these guys. They're very clued and easy to deal with.
Once again, all of the software running on morons.org was developed by me, Nick, aka spatula. I began developing code back in early April, and over the last 15 weeks wrote over 5,000 lines of java code and another 9,000 lines of JSP code. In addition to that, I wrote about 2500 lines of XSL.
Ah yes, XSL. For those who don't know, XSL is the XML Style Language. There's a process called XSLT (XSL Transformations) that basically just changes one type of XML into another. You see, HTML is a big damn pain in the ass to write, especially if you want your code to be portable at all. It is practically impossible to write HTML to take advantage of layout features of modern browsers like Mozilla 5.0 (Netscape 6) without rendering a page unreadable on older browsers like Netscape 3. Yes, people still use Netscape 3. Further, if you thought you were going to get your code to display on a PDA, you can forget about it. That's where XSLT comes in.
New morons.org pages are coded in my own XML entity language. I haven't named it yet, but perhaps someone can think of something clever to call it. Then, based on the browser type detected from your HTTP User-Agent header (a standard header delivered by most web browsers), the site chooses a different XSLT document to perform the transformation. So, Mozilla users don't have to suffer with HTML that was designed to be compatible with Pocket PCs. Because of XSLT, this new site displays reasonably and can be effectively navigated on the following platforms (non-inclusive):
Browsers that can't be classified are assumed to be Netscape 3 compatible. Some platforms have no busy box :-(
Before web pages are sent to the end user (that's you!) they get compressed to use up less of your bandwidth and mine, if your browser supports gzip compression (most do). The result should be faster response time on slow connections (modems, etc) and less cost for my bandwidth!
The new site uses Apache as the front-end web server, Resin as the Java servlet container and JSP engine, PostgreSQL as the back-end database, and the spatula.net news engine (that's my code!).
There are going to be bugs with the new site. It's 5000 lines of Java code on the back end, so we can expect there are still at least 500 bugs in there. Please check the errata for a list of known bugs before you send in a bug report.
Thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoy the new site.
---Nick
HTML generated using XSLT for type-5 browser (HTML 2.0; text-only; no tables; Lynx compatible)