Posts for March 2004

2004-03-03: Python notes updated

I've added some additional notes to my Python language notes page about my experiences when writing Tasker. I'm liking Python quite a bit as a language, particularly for writing CGI scripts (the cgitb module is just excellent for displaying nice error messages while debugging).

2004-03-03 00:46 — Permanent link

2004-03-03: WebAuth 3.2.2

I've finally managed to release the latest version of WebAuth, which is mostly just bug fixes over the previous version. There is one new feature, though, namely a directive that allows one to use WebAuth together with a web server behind a hardware SSL accelerator.

The new version is available from the WebAuth site, which has been newly redone using spin and the ITSS web page templates, and therefore looks prettier, if with a smaller font.

2004-03-03 15:51 — Permanent link

2004-03-23: NNTP to Last Call

Finally and at long last, the new NNTP standard has gone to IETF-wide Last Call. Here's your last chance to comment on it before it becomes a new standard. Here's the copy in the I-D draft archive.

2004-03-23 14:17 — Permanent link

2004-03-25: remctl 1.5

I think I did this release one evening a while back and then forgot to announce it here, so going back to remedy that oversight....

A new release of the remctl system is available, fixing an annoying bug in the configuration file parsing causing a NULL pointer dereference when someone tries a command that isn't present in the configuration file. There's also a portability fix in the way the exit status of the command is returned.

Get the latest version from the remctl distribution page.

2004-03-25 18:33 — Permanent link

2004-03-25: AFS management scripts

I've been working desperately for the past couple of weeks to get as many of the AFS management scripts as we use as possible ready so that when I talked about them at the AFS Best Practices Workshop, people could actually get them off of my web site and try them out.

I didn't manage to get everything done, but there's now a fairly extensive collection of tools available, including some of the AFS commands I use the most frequently (frak to check read/write volumes before release and volcreate to manage volume creation, for example).

See the AFS section on my software page for all the scripts. From this point on, I'll post separate release announcements here when I upgrade them.

2004-03-25 18:46 — Permanent link

2004-03-26: spin 1.39

A bug report from a coworker got me to take another hard look at the scary portions of spin's parsing code that deal with paragraphs that contain mixed block and inline commands. After starting to make it even more complicated and then thinking hard about it for a little while, I found a much better solution that simplified the code and should make it irrelevant to spin how much you want to mix block and inline elements.

You can get the new version from my web tools page.

2004-03-26 23:16 — Permanent link

2004-03-27: spin 1.44

Well, that last release basically didn't work. I thought I was testing the new version and instead was testing the previous version, so of course it produced the same output for my web pages.

This release should actually fix the original problem, and now inline and block commands should be able to be mixed at the same level. Unfortunately, I had to reintroduce a fair bit of complexity to do it. The parsing code continues to be scary.

While I was in the code, though, I also fixed a bunch of other things that had been bothering me for a while. spin now finds .signature files at the top level of the web source tree as well, rather than requiring that they be in every directory. <link> tags are added to the headers of the pages so that browsers with navigation toolbars will be able to walk the page tree more easily. Support for a .versions file listing the versions of software products (which can then be referred to in pages) has been added, along with dependency handling to regenerate a page if it depends on version information that's changed, even if nothing else about the page has changed. A few other bugs and issues have been fixed.

You can get the latest version from my web tools page.

2004-03-27 22:53 — Permanent link