Tristan Waddington

Coding Open – The Benefits of Free and Open-Source Software in Academia

September 4, 2009 in Learning Outcomes, Web Development

The term “open-source software” means many things to many people. To some, it’s a method of collaboration; an easy way for your work to benefit your peers. Others see it as a confusing business paradigm. After all, how can you make money by giving away your work? Still others see it as an affordable way to launch a business; or teach yourself a new skill. Clearly open-source software has many uses. But like anything, it’s important to understand both the benefits and the drawbacks to going open-source. Specifically in an academic setting.

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Learning Outcomes: Javascript Text Wrapping Function

August 17, 2009 in Javascript

This is an old function I wrote a while back and drafted up but never got around to posting. I hacked it together to fix the behavior of some BBCode buttons on one of our older sites.

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Remote system logging with syslog-ng

June 16, 2009 in Unix

Remote system logging has many advantages. If you’re running multiple servers it can be difficult to keep track of all the log files, or pinpoint a problem when one crops up. Read more…

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Learning Outcomes: Generating Useful Error Pages With Pound

March 18, 2009 in Learning Outcomes

We use Pound as a reverse-proxy and load-balancing frontend to our web cluster here in the office. Today we had some NAT problems with our proxy server and ended up with some server downtime. Pound defaults to outputting a cryptic error message when it can’t reach a valid host:

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Learning Outcomes: Compiling Shibboleth-2.1 on FreeBSD 7.0 From Source

January 16, 2009 in Learning Outcomes, Unix

Shibboleth is a Internet2 single sign-on initiative. We were looking into using it to provide authentication services for some of our campus users. Unfortunately they don’t officially support the FreeBSD platform (only Cent-OS and RedHat). They do however provide instructions for compiling the software from source. The first thing you need to do is start compiling the multiple dependencies that Shibboleth will require.

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Getting Wordpress Working on Shell

January 10, 2009 in Web Development

UPDATE: Jeremy Blanchard has written an awesome shell script that will compile and install wordpress for you on your shell account. Check it out here: http://wiki.auzigog.com/Wordpress_on_shell.uoregon.edu

Getting Wordpress working on Shell is slightly more complicated than normal, but still fairly straightforward. The two important hurdles are getting PHP and MySQL working.

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Learning Outcomes: jQuery and AJAX

December 12, 2008 in Javascript, Learning Outcomes

So this term I took CIT 381 Database Systems (part of the CIT minor). For our final project we had to design and implement a database that would store information for a fake K-12 tech conference. So that means information on speakers, topics and volunteers. We were then required to develop a web form that could be used to get information out of that database.

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FreeBSD, APC and File locking = Kernel Panic?

November 13, 2008 in Unix

The other day we had ourselves a little scare. The server crashed: twice in the span of 24 hours. This was after being rock-solid stable for over 60 days. Luckily, we happen to be rock stars and found a fix…

Quick Solution:
If you don’t care about the details simply recompile your APC extension from source with a different “File locking” type. That should fix the problem.

Otherwise read on!

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Extending your web apps with peripherals

October 9, 2008 in Web Development

You may not know it, but it’s relatively simple to extend the value of your web applications with peripherals like barcode scanners and magnetic stripe readers. These devices can both be purchased inexpensively (sub $50 in most cases) and will hookup to any computer via USB. When you’re shopping for these peripherals make sure they have “Keyboard Emulation.” This means that when you hook them up to a computer they will act like a regular input device and simply dump their output as raw text.

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Easy PHP on Shell

September 30, 2008 in PHP

A question I see quite often around campus is how to get PHP working on shell. The easy way is to add a shebang to the top of your php file. Simply add one of these lines (for php4 and php5 respectively) to the very top of any php file that you’re going to be using. Make sure there are no spaces or empty lines above the shebang.

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