Tech Topics

Just posted to the Drupal.org site:

I don't want to submit an issue on Acidfree until I'm sure that I'm not making some foolish mistake, so I'll ask here first.

I have successfully installed Acidfree 4.6.0 into a working 4.6.0 drupal site. I've applied its patch to the filemanager module, created its mysql tables and verified their existence and proper load, enabled the module, set the accesses, and attempted to use it.

Upon creating a new Acidfree album, it appears in "content" as an "Acidfree media"-type node. Attempting then to add a photo, the photo uploads and appears as a Drupal node, but it is not tied to the Acidfree media album. Upon accessing the photo, the following two SQL errors appear:

You can read about the tragic romance of Peter (Pierre) Abelard and Heloise in a number of locations on the net. Suffice to say that it is a story involving great intellectual prowess, a beautiful young student, and castration. Hopefully, none of these characteristics can be found inside the felix.org domain. Especially the last.

It is an interesting name, though, for a machine. The felix.org domain was first hosted on gumby, then okapi, and then janus. When janus suffered a stroke recently, I cobbled a temporary replacement together from odd parts and began planning for a new, better day. He would have drives, lots of drives in a RAID5 configuration. And memory, enough to choke a horse. And processors, more than you can count on one finger. Enough capacity, in other words, to last at least a few years before he needed to be put out to pasture. My storage price point was $.50 per gigabyte. Once I could achieve that, I'd build the new and more capable replacement for janus, codenamed abelard.

felixOrg has been around since about 1998, and the Wayback Machine shows some of its earlier incarnations. The host for felixOrg for the majority of its existence was Old Janus (janus.felix.org). Old Janus died in March 2005. While only a 100 MHz PIII, he was a good soldier with a gig and a half of memory, and fully capable of handling anything I threw at him. He will be missed.

Young Janus has shouldered the load in the meantime. An old Celeron, cobbled together from spare parts and the drives from Old Janus, he stood the watch, but he's not the man his father was. I knew that he would have to be replaced, but I had a bit of time to plan. It was time to create a new generation of machine, one that would serve for several years into the future. He would need processor power, memory in abundance, and lots and lots of drive space. I bided my time as prices continued to fall, as they always do, and when 250GB SATA drives reached $109 apiece, I know the time had come to build.