Such is the namesake for my brand new desktop computer. Well, with a few adjustments. My new desktop is undoubtedly a she, and her DNS name is simply “charlie.”

Before I jump into my usual round of essay scribbling on why this computer is so awesome and why I need it, here are the specs you’re dying to see:

• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition – 4 cores, 3.0GHz
• Gigabyte GA-M790X-UD4P motherboard – Sockets AM2, AM2+, AM3 supported, max. RAM 16GB @ 1333MHz
• 4GB OCZ Gold PC2 6400 DDR2 SDRAM (upgrade to 8GB planned)
• XFX NVidia GeForce GTX 260, 896MB
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer S61EPS 610 power supply
• Western Digital 320GB SATA 3Gb/s hard disk – OEM
• Lian Li PC-K7B case
• DVD burner from Nighthawk

I’m really just getting my feet wet in terms of the stuff I can do with this thing. I didn’t realize for a long time how much I was missing by not having SSE2, AMD-V, and multiple cores. It’s certainly a blessing to have all this and more in such a quiet (albeit relatively large) box.

The benefits of having a computer this powerful are already becoming apparent. When it does crash and X resets (due to this bug), I’m back at my desktop in 10 seconds instead of 30. I can also use Windows 7 and Mac OS X when I have to – both as minimally as possible, Windows for reprogramming Yubikeys (more on those in a minute) and OS X for managing my iPod because iTunes on Windows sucks, and because certain Enano things tend to break under Apple’s OS.

Accompanying this transition is the decommissioning of two computers, Xombie and Capsaicin. Neither was used for very much: Xombie did a poor job at managing torrents and my webcam, and Capsaicin did a somewhat reliable job at running IRC (I’m regularly on 4 networks). Nighthawk has taken over the duties of both, and she continues to be Enano’s Mercurial master as well as the home of all my music (which I can’t stand to not have access to from multiple OSes). Basically Nighthawk is acquiring more duties as she transitions from being the constantly-experimented-with computer to more of a server. I really don’t need Xombie or Capsaicin anymore with the power Nighthawk has and the easy virtualization available to me on Charlie.

We’re looking at some eventual serious overclocking potential on Charlie. Once I’m able to afford a good cooler, I want to try and push her up to 3.7 or even 4GHz. There’ve been some suspicious results with Linpack though – it indicates possible instability under the High load test, 4 threads, and all my settings at stock. Oh yeah, and the CPU peaked at 62C. I’m debating whether it’s necessary to RMA some parts and try a different CPU of the same model, or blame it on the motherboard and RMA that. Either way I’d be without a solid computer for a week or so, which would suck.

Still I am very excited at the potential this thing has. She serves Enano pages in 0.03s and I have Compiz on CRAZY high settings with no signs of stuttering or lag whatsoever. Pretty much everything real-world that I’ve thrown at her, she’s handled with no sweat whatsoever. Hopefully I’ll be at least up with the times for a couple years, eh?

Oh yeah, the Yubikeys. (Published the post without this section, forgot I planned to add it.) Yubico sent me five Yubikey IIs as a thank-you for supporting their device in Enano. The new version, which has a little bit of a learning curve compared to the old, is very useful to me as I see this high degree of security (a 32 character password) now being available to things that don’t support Yubikey (or only support it commercially), like Windows, OS X, and a number of websites I visit. At the same time I retain the OTP functionality for things that support it, like most of my servers and Enano websites. The keys are more solid too – I could run over one of these things with a semi truck if I wanted to. They say they’re also designed to survive a dunk in the swimming pool but I don’t think I’ll try that one. Wonder if that also means they’re tamper-resistant like the IronKey, too. Either way, I’ll be looking into figuring out if there’s anything special that can be added to the Enano Yubikey plugin to make it more friendly to version 2.0 of this very economical, very innovative security device.

A couple of days ago I rewrote the part of template::tplWikiFormat() that parses the conditional blocks ({if foo…}). The code was inefficient and the parser took forever to validate the code. The new parser does a simpler set of checks that should be just as thorough. But the advantage to the new parser is that the inner function that processes the actual expression (“foo…” in the example above) is a separate function. This led me to wonder, what if I used the same function to allow conditional hiding of the whole block?

It turned out to not be a bad idea, so I added two new tag types into the parser: {restrict} and {hideif}. The first hides the block unless the condition is true, and the second only removes the block if the condition is true. This allows for something like:

{restrict auth_admin}

Putting this into, for example, the Tools sidebar block will hide it from everyone except administrators – a helpful feature and one that people have been asking for for a long time. It’s a bit rudimentary, but I think it gives you more power than you’d get with a simple “check the box next to the groups that will see this block.” Another example would be an advertisement block that is only shown to Internet Explorer users that aren’t logged in:

{restrict msie AND !user_logged_in}

The template parser will also set a boolean value “theme_is_<current theme>” to true now, so you can hide blocks for certain themes. Let’s say your theme has its own search bar. You would add this to the Search block:

{hideif theme_is_leonano}

I’d like to make the feature a little more user-friendly, but as of right now you can add {restrict} and {hideif} checks to any sidebar block of any type and achieve the hiding effect, giving you a bit more power than you’d get with a typical GUI editor. Using the same function call also means I can extend it later, letting you use logic such as checking for membership of a certain group, checking the user level, and more. That might not be implemented for a while, but when and if it is it will be a huge increase in power to Enano’s currently barely-holding-together sidebar framework.

Enano’s development and progress towards its gold release is going pretty much as planned, albeit a lot slower than originally expected. As mentioned in the last post, it got a bad case of feature creep. But the hard work has paid off. Enano 1.0RC1 will be released tomorrow, after two months since the 1.0b4 release. As was implied by the RC1 release date, Enano will use a codename theme of Irish mythical characters: RC1 will be Leprechaun, RC2 will be Clurichaun, and the gold release will be Banshee (hence the “wail of the banshee” joke on the testbay front page).

I didn’t have time to do as much QA as I wanted. I’ve already gone around and fixed *a lot* of bugs since the so-called code freeze last night. The security audits have been less intensive than I had hoped, and Neal, who was going to be doing some virtualized testing on Windows servers, had an unfortunate problem with his Internet connection (wasn’t his fault), so Enano hasn’t been completely tested with some versions of IIS.

I hope you all enjoy using Leprechaun as much as I loved putting it together. Cheers!

Edit: I just realized it’s past midnight. So Leprechaun gets released today.

But that doesn’t mean that the “cool factor” will be turned down. I’ve got plans.

The idea is to have a very customizable sidebar that allows almost any type of code to be included. Using the sidebar editor, you will be able to use drag and drop to re-order the blocks. The editor will also include options for deleting and editing blocks in-line using Javascript and AJAX.

Right now I’ve finished the parser, and the new database-driven sidebar can be seen on the testbay site. The hard part is going to be porting the drag-n-drop code (Brothercake’s DBX, the same one used in WordPress) to work with AJAX. I’m also having trouble with some of the Javascript-based plugins (like Surveryor and AjIM) in the editor because it essentially creates a second set of sidebars inside of the main page area, thus causing the node IDs to be used more than once and making Javascript applets go haywire. I figured the solution here was to nuke both of the sidebars, but the template class refuses to hear it. Once I can get that working I’ll start on the drag-n-drop code, then I’ll finish it off with edit/delete buttons. Hopefully I can have it all finished in a week.

Anyone else want to challenge the world’s coolest Web 2.0 CMS?

In a related note, Midget 1.0 beta 1 has finally been released.

For those of you who have been following Midget’s development, I think I should annouce that I’ve decided to rewrite it. Completely.

No lie, peoples!

Midget in its current state is very disorganized – all the layers are there, but you gotta remember all sorts of weird globals, mainly because the old Midget was based on code that is being used at the ExperienceUI website which is really old, bloated, and inefficient. Also, Midget currently makes 25-30 SQL queries per page, plus another 10 or so for the comments form, and 5 or so each for each of the AJAX applets. I managed to get that number down to 6 queries per page for non-logged-in users, and 8 q/pg for logged-in users, because of the additional checks required to authenticate their session. I also hate that wiki formatting engine – it has a lot of bugs and it isn’t properly parsing some pages, specifically when I ported the GNU General Public License to wiki-formatting.

The half-finished rewritten version of Midget can be seen in action at http://area51.midget.no-ip.org/. The first thing you’ll notice is the visual style – I decided to get rid of that old “box art” theme as that too was a rip on the ExperienceUI website. I decided to go with a 3rd-party wiki formatter, as I really suck at parsing text and stuff. Currently I’m using Text_Wiki, which seems to be a lot more compact – and easy to implement – than MediaWiki’s parser. The original plan was to port MW’s parser but…ech…Parser.php is 144KB, then there are like 2 more files you gotta include and though I did manage to partially port it, I eventually ended up with some strange object that looked like it was used for search indexing as opposed to a wiki-formatting parser.

Someday, whenever that is, I’ll write a search page for Midget. I’m really kind of scared to do it, though, because like I said I really suck at parsing text. And parsing text is really the only way to write a mini-search engine. So no searchable websites for awhile, I’m afraid, Midget users.

Well I gotta wrap it up here, got some work to do on Midget though I’m really quite tired even though it’s only 10:45. Probably gonna have to get a cup of coffee or something so I can survive my to-do list:

Midget – TODO:
————————————————————————
[x] Rollback of logged items (when possible)
[x] Comment system
[ ] Finish admin panel
[x] Admin panel options for site name/site desc
[ ] Page categorization
[ ] Make sidebar SF logo and W3C validation buttons actually work
[ ] Make JWS compatible with Internet Exploder
[ ] Make Special:Contributions work
[ ] (minor) Show a notice when delete-votes > 0
[ ] Implement the ability for users to choose themes/styles

This past month I’ve been working on a lot of updates for Midget. Mainly a “wiki mode” feature that turns Midget into a compact version of MediaWiki. Once again it’s 100% original code – believe me, when I took a look at MediaWiki’s formatting parser I almost fainted. As far as I can tell it doesn’t use preg_replace even once. So using regular expressions (think /^(.+)\n([A-z0-9]*)/si) I did in 20 lines what it took the MW team to do in 50 or 60 lines. Anyways Midget now officially supports wiki mode and the basics of wiki formatting, page history, et cetera. Todo: file uploads, better page author tracking, and of course security fixes.

I suppose that I should mention my anti-Vista activist site: http://whynotvista.midget.no-ip.org/. I plan to change the hostname to whynotvista.no-ip.org soon, so be prepared. Sometime I’ll post something here about Treacherous Computing, whenever I get around to it. Actually it’s 2 AM right now I couldn’t sleep, something woke me up and I can’t figure out what the heck it was. I’m starting to get sleepy again so I’ll head back to bed.

Today I rewrote the way Midget thinks “administration.” The new admin panel (demo not yet available) uses the new template system for drawing the admin panel. The panel is also more organized now, and hopefully this will pave the way to having a very robust and complete configuration system.

Edit: http://midget.no-ip.org/ — Update: link removed, the midget.no-ip.org hostname is dead, it’s moved here.
-dandaman32