TTK Ciar's Journal: On Wikis and Computer Racks

Gaaah! Too long since last journal entry!

Six months, and no journal entry .. how utterly pathetic. In the meantime cobalt (aka "invisiblecrazy") has been writing up a storm. Well, here's a new one.

Chronicles of The Beast, Part One

A friend of mine was getting rid of a computer cabinet, and asked if I wanted it. Naturally, I leapt at the opportunity. I've been meaning to build a server rack from wood for a while now, and I had a place set aside in our shed outside for just that.

So I woke up at 6am, borrowed my wife's truck for the day, and picked the beast up. And it was quite the beast. I'd been expecting something like the cheesy minimalist computer racks we use at The Archive, but this was anything but. The steel load-bearing structure was completely encapsulated in aluminum walls, with a locking tinted polycarbonate door. I could barely fit it into the back of cobalt's little truck! But that was really the easy part.

After work, I took the beast home, where it stayed for another day before I found the time to get it into the shed. And this is where the story really begins.

Getting the beast into the truck was made relatively easy by the caster wheels on its bottomside, and the nice flat pavement from my friend's carport to his driveway. The grounds around my house are not paved, but rather dirt covered by a four inch or so layer of pebbles. Nor are the grounds flat, the soil is too marshy for that. It flows around and makes little slopes everywhere. Nonetheless, I figured I had a pretty clear shot from the driveway through the side yard and into the shed, and I figured our handcart's 12-inch wheels would be up to the task of transporting it across the rocks.

So I got the casters off, lowered the beast onto the push cart, strapped it to the cart for good measure, and started down the side yard. I didn't get it very far. The ground had a distinct slope to the left, away from the house and towards the fence that separated the side yard from the drainage ditch. The pebbles were mostly navigable, but when the cart got stuck anywhere I couldn't jar it or rock it out or the entire cabinet would try to topple downhill. I worked at it for about an hour before rethinking my approach. If I kept it up, the cabinet would end up crashing through the fence and getting stuck in the ditch, where I would surely never dislodge it. So I laid down some wood to give myself a flatter surface, and used different thicknesses so that the cabinet would be more level in its trek.

Did I mention it was heavy? At seven feet tall and two feet wide, this thing was really damn heavy. Keeping it from toppling over was like wrestling with a poltergeist-infested coke machine.

Anyway, I finally got it to the shed, which I had prepared carefully to make room for its passage, and only then realized that I'd committed a grave oversight: Though I had carefully measured the space in which it was going, I had not thought to measure the entrance to the shed itself, which was far, far too short to allow the cabinet's passage. In the end I had to tip it over so it was laying down flat, with my body underneath it, then lift it straight up and push it through the shed entrance. Damn it was heavy.

After that, it should have been smooth sailing, but once again I fell prey to the hazard of unlevel surfaces. The floor of our shed was made of shipping palettes, and they were not all the same height, so the cabinet listed somewhat to the left. I had carefully measured the width of the shed's central aisle, and even at its tightest points it was a few inches wider than the cabinet -- or at least, a few inches wider than a *perfectly upright* cabinet. The leftward list was sufficient to close this slim margin, and a few items got knocked over before I again used tactically-positioned pieces of wood to give the cabinet a level surface on which to ride.

After that, it was smooth sailing. Three hours of hot, back-breaking tedium was all it took to get the beast into place. And now it is mine, and I have a newfound appreciation for level paved surfaces. :-) Time to start rackin' up those computers!

Little Black Car, Revisited

Soon after my previous blog entry, I got my little honda's tires more fully inflated and its oil changed, and now it's regularly getting 35 miles to the gallon -- one mpg more if I drive it nicely, one mpg less if I abuse it mercilessly. I have to admit to be getting 34mpg more often than I get 36mpg, because half the joy of having a stick-shift transmission is abusing it mercilessly.

I also settled on a bumper sticker, but have yet to put it on my actual bumper. The sticker itself was a row of three anarchist circle-A symbols (in the old style, not the Anarcho-Punk style made popular in the 1970's), but I cut it into three pieces so now I have three square-shaped anarchist circle-A stickers. One I put on the back of my laptop. One I will put on my car, but haven't yet. I haven't decided what to do with the third.

That rear bumper is not completely unadorned, however; my beloved wife found a "duct tape is like the force" sticker and stuck it on my bumper while I wasn't looking. :-)

Falling Prey to the Wiki Meme

I have been writing a little software for importing masses of data into a MediaWiki, an online resource which generates and manages webpages which anyone (or a whitelisted userbase) can update or edit. This is in response to two problems which I think Wiki-hosting material might address.

First, the system I have been using to manage my MBT Resources pages is woefully inadequate. One of my passtimes is researching battletank technology, and resources which seem rare or of scientific or engineering value get saved to my home workstation's hard drive. I then have a tool which can be used to curate this content, and export it into a simple webpage format.

This system has problems. It is tedious and time-consuming to sift through all this content, the resulting web pages are rather sparse and featureless, and once the content is cast into this web format it is difficult to update. As a result I have updated my site little in the last couple of years, even though I have amassed enough new material to easily triple it in size.

Second, Tank Net, a vibrant and valuable online forum for tank enthusiasts, has problems of its own. People there like to talk about tanks, but they don't like to read old discussions. This results in a lot of newbie questions and myths being posed over and over again, and the old regulars are getting tired of repeating the same answers and rebuttals. There are members who are visibly at odds with the disorganized and transient nature of BBS content, and I get the impression these members would appreciate a more organized and longer-lasting medium to target with their online muse.

I think a Wiki would address both, my problems with my website, and the tanknetters' frustrations, with a little help from software I have been developing at The Archive to sort disorganized content. I can automatically organize my new content into something approximating the right layout (tanks here, other afv's there, armor on its own set of pages, and munitions in their own, etc), and then use MediaWiki's powerful content curation tools to reorganize misplaced content and add descriptions to them in an ad-hoc fashion. The resulting documents would be nicely cross-linked (one of the features of Wikis is that when a term shows up in a document, and that term has its own document associated with it, that term is made into a hyperlink for its document).

Furthermore, since MediaWiki allows users to discuss the content of Wiki documents (each page has a "discuss" link attached to it, which leads to a forum interface, sort of), users can pose their questions and observations about the material, and a FAQ in the content page from which the discussion is linked might cut down on the repeatedly posed newbie questions. I would whitelist a select body of users (mostly tanknetters) and allow them to contribute to the Wiki in general. Hopefully this will lead to a more generally useful and better put-together resource than my current MBT pages.

Anyway, that's The Plan and the theory behind it. Execution of that plan remains to be seen.

Postscript

Those of you who are familiar with what's going on with my life lately might be surprised that I failed to mention a few important developments. This is not because I do not consider these developments meaningful, but rather it is because I do not want to talk about them in my public journal.

-- TTK

Re:

[TTK Ciar]

Ooh, if you finish that mediawiki thingie, can I check out the code? My work wants me to migrate our internal wiki at some point and mediawiki is a likely target.

Of course! Though, did you have an idea of which version of MediaWiki you were going to use? 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 have some significant differences in their database schemas. I picked 1.5 because it provided all of the features I needed, but it's not too late for me to switch (as having someone else who wants to look at or use my code makes me

Please note:

[addruzl]

Said wife whose truck he borrowed was home at the time he was doing "The Dance of the Mad Computer Collector" and not once did he ask for help. Had I known, I would have helped, or at least mocked and/or videotaped...