Deviant Solutions

Francis and I are working on the Game Design Invitational for the 2008 Microsoft Imagine Cup. Things are already shaping up, we have the "goal" or outline of what we want to accomplish and how the game world will be created. Overall this promises to be an interesting project. I have added a link to the project's page in the top right corner of the site.

http://TerraNet.deviantsolutions.net/

For the past month or so I have been using my laptop as a media center / dedicated counter-strike source server for my friends. This has been fun and all, but I have decided to take things up a notch. I have run linux on the laptop before, but only for short periods, eventually something would come along and I would switch back to windows. I have decided to run Gentoo 2007.0 with the Dedicated Server and some sort of media center software. I think I may also work the dedicated server stats into a section of this site, but that is just speculation right now.

I have just performed another Drupal install over at http://www.soc.deviantsolutions.net/. I hope to use that area as my testing ground for the module I will be writing this summer. The first module I will be writing is a "Featured Links" block. It will incorporate the actual block to display the links and the interface to add links to the block. I am sure something similar to this is already out there, but I need something to get my feet wet in the Drupal environment.

Francis and I decided to get this webspace so we would have a place to work with rails and PHP. Also because Dreamhost is awesome we have two subversions running on it and 3 Drupal installations. I am happy about these because I am a Google Summer of Code participant working for Drupal writing a BitTorrent tracker module. It is interesting that it has taken four months to finally setup the root of our webspace, but Francis and I have been so busy and we pretty much just kept to our individual sub-domains.

The Drupal BitTorrent Tracker project looks to provide Drupal users the power of the BitTorrent protocol when moving large files from their website to their visitors. The main outcome of this project will be a BitTorrent “invisible tracker” that integrates with Drupal through a module. The module will allow for the addition and removal of torrents, IP address management (banning IP addresses or ranges) and statistical presentation concerning information about the tracker (current seeders, leechers, swarm speed, active torrents, etc.).

1. Fix homepage header
   • Removed target from the link to the VCU homepage
2. Adjust Sitemap.html
   • Removed all references to port 83 from the sitemap page.
3. Adjust Rotating Content System
   • Rewrote the javascript that parses the XML for the dynamic content system.
   • Adjusted the XML scheme to match the parsing system.
   • Added PubMed and Lexis Nexis to featured resource.
4. LinkScan new site
   • Generated a list of third tier pages to be updated.
   • Found problems leading to many 404 errors.
5. Validate Web Manual Pages
   • Moved style_new.css & print.css from production to staff.
   • Added print.css to generic_navpanel.
   • Fixed header problems on staff site.
   • Created the print icon for web manual pages.
   • Adjusted the footers' copyright to 2007.
   • Made "Staff Web" clickable from the staff header.
6. Research custom list icons
   • Tested different icons sizes to determine the maximum icon dimensions.
7. QuickSearch.cfm adjustments
   • Modified QuickSearch.cfm to redirect to catalog.cfm, to generate a better entry link into aleph
8. Caching Engine
   • I have created a engine in perl that caches a website periodically to avoid slow-down due to outside resources.
   • The system uses md5 hashes to determine whether the files have changed since the last caching.

So here is a list of everything so far this week:

1. Fix JBC Special Collection pages
   • Finished Comic Book Pages
   • Finished Mason Pages
   • Finished Stove Pages
   • Finished Sykes Page
   • Finished JBCBIO Page
2. Featured Resource
   • Added PubMed to the featured resource rotation
3. Fix Headers
   • Added a trailing slash to the ask a librarian link
   • Removed the target attribute from the VCU Link
   • Moved to production and ssl
4. New Staff Side Header
   • Remove fly-downs and replace with links used on the staff web.
   • Removed font-change and Ask a Librarian links
   • Moved to staff production site.
5. Fix CSS Validation Errors
   • overflow-x is CSS3 and we are using CSS2, so this did not validate. Replacing overflow-x with overflow caused the page to break, removing all scroll bars
   • Removed the padding-left from the page-footer in layout.css
   • Added the footBlock div into the footer to contain the text and provide a left side margin, Without requiring an overflow property.
6. Fix Page Validation Errors
   • The search box's query field does not have a label attached to it. To meet section 508 compliance it needed an ALT attribute attached to the input box.
   • Adjusted the label for the search type to point at the corect element, previously there was a capitalization error.
7. Search Header Files
   • To get a general idea of how many pages use each specific header the template search BASH script was modified to search for and count all occurrences of calls to the various header files. Some sample statistics are below:

   Header FilePercentage of Pages
   HEADER.HTML84%
   HEADER_BRIEF.HTML2%
   HEADER_BRIEF_JBC.HTML10%
   HEADER_BRIEF_TML.HTML3%
   HEADER_VCU.HTML1%
   HEADER_ILL.HTML0%
   HEADERSSL.HTML0%

Quick Update...
The new library homepage is almost complete with an expected roll out of December 15th. Everyday we get closer and closer to a finished product and now we are down to the days of polishing every last detail before the final change over. Almost all pages on the production server have been touched with a majority being put into templates for easier updating in the future.

Today marks another step towards website redesign implementation. If you are lucky enough to be able to reach the redesign port, kudos to you, you may now view the development of the web site. If not, um... wait until December like everyone else. With this new port we can test all links as though they are in the root of the production server. This in turn will hopefully limit the amount of errors that occur during roll out. Anyway I had nothing to do with making the port it is just really cool.

With the redesign we have many opportunities to integrate new technologies, due to the fact that computers have higher performance capabilities and the number of internet users on broadband increases, allowing more content to be moved faster. One of these new technologies is using client-side scripting to alter the presentation of the content. For instance the redesign now has a hidden element that blinds down after the user clicks a button. The effects used come from the Spry framework from adobe labs.