Friday, July 06, 2007

Creole Computing

Today turned out to be quite interesting. I think that I have mentioned here before that I have been helping a friend of mine who is running for State office. My main job has been to work on his web site. He is an excellent candidate, a thoughtful, intelligent and funny man. He is a great person to have as a friend. However, the web site got a little 'exciting' today, as his candidacy announcement is coming very soon.

Today, his wife an I went through final editorial changes on the site. It is really nice to work with someone with an eye for detail, punctuation and all the things that I am not always good at, when hacking code. She also produces excellent text to fill out the site.

I really wish I could share this site with you, as it has turned out to be excellent. I am very proud of it! The code is clean and slick. It loads incredibly fast, which is important, as some of the voters in the relevant district may only have dial up connections. Take my word, it is a beauty!

Unfortunately this evening, we ran into an interesting technical problem. It turns out that the plan was originally to host the site on a new server. What complicated matters was that it turned out to be rather difficult (as in, impossible) to redirect people from the old site (my friend had an older site, at the same address), to the new one. In technical terms, this was a DNS change problem.

This evening, I went over to my friends house. We worked on the problem. By a little judicious hacking, I was able to back up his old site and the upload the new site to the original server. In the meantime, his wife continued to edit the content. It was a fun evening of hacking. We drank a couple of Martinis. We chatted. We laughed. Although it took a while, the new site is up and running and looks just great!

I also got to meet Windoze Vista for the first time. I was not impressed. Although I am forced to use XP for some jobs, I mostly prefer Linux as my main operating system. I will make sure that I don't get Vista, when I get a new computer.

However, the interesting thing about today was how I was able to do something very concrete and useful for my friend. I am certain that many of the silly people who waffle on about race and related matters on their blogs did nothing similar. As I have said before, "actions speak louder than words".

The CP

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Listed on 
BlogShares web stats Site Meter