2016 — 12 March: Saturday
Although I firmly believe in Heinlein's TANSTAAFL1 that's exactly what I've been promised today :-)
I shall be discussing with my son the perils and pitfalls of relocating 'molehole' on to an AWS hosting system. I am now satisfied that it safely transmogrifies into fully static HTML from its present SHTML (Server Side Include) approach. Brian's well-tempered Python does that particular bit of business for me in just under 10 seconds — and careful scrutiny of its status report when I last ran it showed me I had made just one SSI-related error in 19,600 of the things. (I had omitted the quotation marks around a single SSI2 but this went unrevealed on the file concerned because Firefox is a little too forgiving.)
It may, or may not, turn out to need changing from having ˜david as its top-level folder name. (That tiny squiggle is a tilde character lest you wonder.) That, too, is a change ready to roll out if necessary. I admit it's a hangover from the web sites I was wrangling in IBM back in 1994. My goodness, where the hell did that Time go?
Good grief
George Martin, Keith Emerson, who's next I wonder?
There's a 1985 novel...
... by James Tiptree Jr (aka Alice Sheldon). Back in slightly less ancient times — but still before I'd got into the habit of scanning my book covers — I had noted the arrival of the superb 2006 biography of her, but nothing more. Let's put that right, right now!
And what made me think of this?
During a burst of tidying up (in a flurry of dust) at one point I had six Chinese LED lights "blazing away" (as dear Mama would doubtless have put it) last night here in the living room, at 13 watts apiece. Even someone of moderate numeracy could work out this is less than a single 100 watt incandescent. Hence "Brightness falls from the air".
Summoned by an email...
... just as I had been about to tuck into my healthy breakfast sludge, I nipped quickly down into Portsmouth and back to pick up a nice big cardboard box containing BlackBeast Mk IV build. And, in a separate little package, the 512GB SSD that will give Linux somewhere to rest its head at night. I've not yet broken into the big box, however, as first I entertained my bread delivery man with a cuppa and then the young people showed up to whisk me out for another nice lunch at an Italian place called "Max's Bistro" in Soton. A sports shop and a bookshop then delayed the trip home. Putting paid to the chance of any free gardening, alas.
The young people are now out stocking up on raspberries, ice-cream and (I suspect) popcorn ahead of an evening film or two. They've also requested a 7 a.m. wake-up call tomorrow to get them up and off out in time for their horse-riding session over in Luton. I didn't ask. So I'm currently predicting I may actually be able to start tinkering with BB Mk IV quite early tomorrow. Won't that be good fun?
Relocating 'molehole' over to AWS has...
... been given the green light. Apparently, updating web pages in future (after the initial one-time upload) will be just a question of my using a command-line tool from here in Technology Towers to sync my local web file folder(s) with the geographically-nearest AWS host. This, in turn, sends the HTML files along to various other nodes to make page-serving more or less equally speedy wherever my far-flung readers hang their hats. Nor is there going to be any need to change the name of my top-level folder, so I shall stick with ˜david. It has a nicely old-fashioned feel to it by now, I feel. I'm not exactly sure when Peter will get this done, but there should be little or no visible disturbance to any browsers.
He's planning to make some sort of training video to document the process of how to go about setting up AWS hosting, and 'molehole' may even therefore be able to serve as his "example" project. I shall probably put in place a "fake" index.shtml file at the top of the "tree" to display a reminder of the small but vital change to the URL. That URL will once again now end in ".html" rather than ".shtml" but I expect people will cope with that.
After watching...
... the BBC film of Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen" (which they both seemed to enjoy) I received a quick tutorial in setting up and using Amazon's S3 for hosting a static web site. The tools are very reminiscent of the AIX approach I had to use in the earliest days of my IBM Java web sites, but I've been given a couple of GUI options that may prove workable. And I shall be able to upload the site and tinker with it in parallel to the current 'molehole' until we propagate the DNS changes. S3 lacks the concept of folders, and sticks rigidly to paths and objects at the end of them. I expect I can get used to this.
As for today's pair of books:
