foss

So recently I have run into some fun to do with the apache Web server, and I thought it was worth sharing.  Well I didn't really, but my buddy Jeff did.  Just about every time there is a holiday over the weekend at my work, at some point the Web server would run out of memory so badly it would crash.  It would crash so hard in fact, that it had to be hard power cycled.  I have tried just about everything short of sacrificing a chicken to try and figure this out.  Everything from cron jobs to bad PHP scripts (not mine of course ), but never really figured out the root cause.  Of course that was until MLK Jr. Weekend.

I just released a new version of formunculous to the Internets.  It has

a bunch of new features for managing database or email backed Web forms.  It offers a lot of new functionality, and continues to bring easy form creation and processing.  Check it out at the Formunculous Source Forge page.

Here are the release notes:

I've posted a code project on SourceForge I've been working on for the last couple months called formunculous.  The project page is at sf.net/projects/formunculous. It is a Django application that makes creating database or email based forms easy.  It uses a fairly advanced drag and drop based interface for building forms.  It can be used for anything from simple email contact forms to complex authenticated applications for programs, event registrations, etc.  It handles several types of data including files, pictures, and documents.

I have been waiting years for something like mod_gnutls to show up.  Finally I can use named hosts with SSL/TLS.  I just setup a new VPS and needed to setup three sites with SSL.  The problem is that I only have two IP addresses and an additional one would cost $1.50/month.  I was going to be happy with paying that extra money to have secured Web communication for authentication purposes, but I'm a cheap skate.

I created a scripting framework for Powershell that makes running scripts for help desk employees/end users much simpler as well as assisting with managing the many scripts you may have, and providing simplified methods of coding common tasks such as using CSVs and Active Directory for input. There is even a brain dead way to provide multithreading in your scripts for increasing performance on long running scripts. I have posted the code under GPLv3 at http://posh.codeplex.com. Contributions to the script library are always welcome, as well as bug reports and enhancements for the framework itself.

One of the projects I've worked on at the University of Kansas, School of Engineering is the thin client PiXiE thin client project. This project started as brainstorm for creating high performance machines that provide limited but critical functions for engineering students. As a university we have constant budget problems and a difficult time coming up with enough money to maintain current computer hardware. This problem is compounded by the fact that engineers use a lot of high end memory, graphics and processor intensive software for modeling designs. Add to this that most of our students have better computers than we can offer due to budget constraints and typically only use our computer labs for free printing and Web access at school and we have the PiXiE projects.

Sun, April 27 2008

I spent a great deal of time yesterday messing with Samba and Windows Server 2008. I thought it would just be my normal messing around, but at some point by broken brain decided it was REALLY important to get linux connected to Windows Server 2008's Active Directory. Unfortunately, the currently released version of Samba 3.0.28a does not allow joing a linux computer to an Active Directory hosted on Windows 2008. But on the samba mailing list there was mentioning that on the test branch that they had fixed.

Well, I've written another software utility that I've had published on Sourceforge This one is called Mac-Ro-Knife and it can be downloaded at Mac-Ro-Knife.SF.net. Mac-Ro-Knife provides a utility function for systems administrators to run batch style command sets on multiple machines for things such as changing local accounts, transferring log files, or making configuration changes.

I've been working on an application for the last few weeks that seemed good enough to release to the public. Its called AudioM - Audio Mover/Mobile and it copies songs in a play list to a new location and creates a new play list that matches the new locations. It's primarily useful if you have a disk based MP3 player (in particular a Sansa).