Computer progress and planning

[mdlbear]

It hasn't been a terribly busy week computer-wise here at the Starport, but considering that I've done practically nothing over the rest of this last month, at least I've been comparatively productive this weekend. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The flower_cat has been complaining recently about her bedroom machine being too slow -- in particular, it doesn't handle flash or audio very well. It was a 1GHz Via C7; fanless, but wimpy, especially for floating point. Swapped one of the Fry's boxes (Seymore) back in, with a little extra RAM. Works, and the Cat's happy.

I may well end up using the C7 (Dantooine) out here in the living room; it's about twice as fast as the ancient Thinkpad I'm using now, and it work well for the kind of rolling workstation I'm contemplating building. Main advantage, really, would be a bigger display.

The workstation comes about because I've shifted a lot of my operations to the living room these days. I want something that will serve not only as a computer workstation but a guitar stand, music stand, and tray table. It will take some carpentry, I think. It probably doesn't want to move back and forth between the office and living room, but definitely wants to move the short distance between a comfy chair for hacking and an armless chair for guitar. And, of course, get moved around for cleaning.

 

The main project on the software front right now is a massive reorganization of steve.savitzky.net and the corresponding working directory.

Songs -> Lyrics This is half of the big one. Basically, all my song lyrics are going into the Lyrics directory, which will contain the lyrics source files (*.flk), the postscript files for printing, and nothing else. It'll be web accessible so that I can print lyrics at conventions, but won't have to be linked. A minor advantage will be that filename completion will work nicely, since emacs and bash are both smart enough to offer only appropriate completions, and there will be only two.

Songs/*/ This is the second half: every song will have a subdirectory in Songs, with the short name that I've been using all along. This will have a couple of good effects: URLs will be shorter (since you won't need the ".html" extension), and I'll be able to pile lots of stuff into the directory: graphics, multiple audio files, fan comments, and so on. Ultimately I'll be able to customize every song's "home page" if I want to; the chaoswolf is eager to work on some of this.

Fiction->Lit, Non-Fiction->Doc This is a minor one; Doc is already what I'm using on the website for nonfiction; Non-Fiction is what I was using in the working directory. This just makes it uniform. I was using Fiction in both places, but calling it Lit makes more sense, as it includes both prose and poetry.

This brings me to the present. All the reshuffling has been done, but it's not live on the web, and all the tools are broken because they haven't been updated. So that's next:

Tools All the Makefiles and scripts need to be updated to use the new directory structure. Not too hard, but potentially somewhat tricky in spots. I'll need to be able to auto-generate a few files in the song subdirectories: Makefile, index.html, and HEADER.html. I also need to auto-generate the redirects required to make all the old URLs continue to work, for the sake of the bazillions of links already out there. A better alternative might be suitable rewrite rules.

Web page edits Naturally, all of the hand-created web pages that refer to songs (or to files in the Fiction subdirectory) need to have their links updated; in most cases this will be a simple matter of replacing .html with /, but it has to be done. It should be possible to do most of it with a perl script, but it will require some hand-checking; an emacs keyboard macro and grep-find would probably be better.

Web site master directories Right now steve.savitzky.netis simply a mirror of my older page at thestarport.org/Steve_Savitzky/. It needs a working directory in its own right, and the old page needs to simply link to the subdirectories. Or redirect the whole thing, though that might be a little harder.