On 5 Jan 2002 at 20:33, Robert A. Knop Jr. wrote:
> What kind of Perl/MySQL/CGI do you guys need done over there? (I ask
All kinds.
> this on managers rather than privately just because somebody else might
> be intersted in the discussion.) I consider myself an accomplished Perl
> programmer, a comptent (or somewhat better) CGI programmer, and a
> moderately knowlegdable MySQL programmer (at least from the Perl DBD
> module). I use Perl/MySQL/CGI on both www.dramex.org and
DBD is all I use. I've considered doing something more direct for
speed reasons, but so far it hasn't been worth it.
> I tend to be pretty busy, so I'd hesitate to commit to too much; my
> favorite would be if you had something relatively self-contained for me
> to bash away at. However, I might be of some help.
Unfortunately, mostly what I need right now is someone good at
building interfaces. F'rinstance, the current web interface to edit
settings is cotton-pickin' clunky (/register.html and environs)
because it's designed to be completely independent of the data it
modifies (that is, you can add fields to the database without
changing the script itself), when what we really need is something
more specialized (i.e. it needs to have a specific interface for
modifying alternate addresses). I also need to do some
friendliazation work on the login stuff.
The other hot issue is web forums. I've been looking over IkonBoard
and YaBB and suchlike, and it wouldn't be *too* hard to patch in code
to pipe mailing list messages into one, and pipe web-posted messages
the other direction. However, I haven't had time nor inclination to
properly evaluate the web forum package itself... I installed YaBB on
the wirebird side and the consensus there seems to be that the
interface sucks. And I've looked a little bit at the IkonBoard code,
and there's apparently *no* file locking going on (start two threads
at the same time, and they'll stomp all over each other), and that's
just at a first glance. There's a whole bunch more at
but I haven't looked any more of them over.
What we *really* want there is not so much a "web forum" interface as
it is a "mail/news reader" interface, such that a logged-in user can
navigate the whole thing as if he's a mail subscriber. That's a self-
contained app, but a big honkin' one.
> On another issue, I saw in your blog that a couple of weeks ago you were
> getting network cards and hubs and cabling so forth to have a computer
> "upstairs". Have you already run cat-5 through your house? I did that
> (to just two rooms) in my old house, but only to one room in the new
> house. For things like hooking in a laptop, I got two wireless cards;
> that was much nicer, as there are no limits on where I can be in the
> house, and I didn't have to run so much bloody cable....
Considering that we're running cable for not just the network, but
phone (when we moved in, there was one (1) phone jack installed...
we've since run two more. Sort of. The second one upstairs consists
of a 50' extension cord, which runs from the bedroom into the hall,
down the cold-air return, out through a hole punched in the duct tape
(perhaps the only example I've ever seen of duct tape *on* ductwork)
and spliced into a splitter lying loose on the furnace room floor.
It was supposed to be a temporary fix, but we've lived here seven
years or so), speaker wire, digital cable (we have DirecTV), and so
on. Besides, we're only cabling from a largish furnace room into the
living room (two drops there, though), kitchen/den, and two bedrooms.
It's not a large house.
In theory, since we have a full basement (well, there's a crawl space
under the back 8' of the house, but it's relatively accessible) and
attic access, we ought to be able to run the cable fairly easily. In
practice, the previous owners have done some weird stuff with
ductwork and wallboard and things.
Still not quite as strange as my mother's house. Now, that house is
new construction (as opposed to our 80-year-old, added onto three
times, renovated an unknown number of times, house) built on a
hillside, single story, with a basement that runs from about 3' deep
at the front to a full story on the back. There's been a room
extension built onto the back of the house, and subsequently the area
underneath has been enclosed and turned into a pretty nice workshop.
She wants a phone down there. No problemo, right, we can just tap
into the cable underneath the house, the only hard part is getting it
through the former-exterior basement wall, but in a pinch we can run
it through the existing doorway since there's plenty of now-obsolute
weatherstripping we can cut. So I wander
around on the slope underneath there. Plenty of Romex, all sorts of
CATV, hot and cold pipes... nary a smidgen of phone line.
Huh? I go outside and look at the utility demarcs on the side of the
garage. There's a CATV box there, with conduit going down into
the ground. Same like electrical. That matches up with what I saw
under the house, yep. But the phone does the same thing.
Huh? I go back underneath, poke the insulation around. There's the
other end of the AC conduit, the other end of the CATV
conduit... no phone.
So I go into the garage, and go up in the attic. Sho nuf, there's
the phone line, peeking up for just a little bit before it dives
under the
insulation. Apparently the thing goes underground, *then* they built
it into the wall going *up*. The kicker is, the attic *ends* way
before the relevant end of the house, since there's a vaulted ceiling
in the kitchen (about which I could tell a funny story involving a
can opener, but not right now). As near as I can tell, there *is* no
attic access for the other side of the house.
So apparently next time I'm down there, I'm bringing the 12" drill
extension and we're going to tap it at a jack and just drill a hole
in the floor to run a cable down, probably violating fire code in the
process. What I'm thinking, though, is that she should get a pair of
cordless phones, and plug one base unit into the phone line upstairs,
and put its handset downstairs on the second base unit (plugged into
AC only). Her cordless works fine down there, she just doesn't like
having to remember to carry it down, keep it charged, etc.
But I digress.
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