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entries for 2002/7/14
thinkwell courses
Interesting... thinkwell sells multimedia textbooks online. The demos look really well done. The books are expensive, but when you consdier that they contain their own lectures, it's basically like taking a course. I might just sign up for the MacroEconomics course. Check it out... The excerpt demonstrates why a minimum wage can be harmful to unskilled workers, since it allows a skilled worker to replace multiple unskilled workers for a better price.
finally! a dns database!
I've spent most of the past twelve hours working on a database. My goal was to be able to generate my nameserver configuration files automatically. The trouble was that I was working with a database that I slapped together several months ago, before I really understood what I needed. Some of what I needed to do just plain did not fit in the database, so I had information in the namserver files that wasn't in the database (things like MX records and some of the earlier subdomain entries).
Anyway, half a day of manual cleanups, data migration, entity relationship diagrams, and python scripting later, I can generate my nameserver configuration on the fly.
The mail server has been database-driven for a couple months now,
so that just leaves apache. I tried making an apache configuration database a while back, but it references the DNS stuff in an odd way for the ServerName and ServerAlias, and with my original nameserver tables, it just didn't work. This time around, I've thought everything through, so it should be a walk in the park.
And then I'll build a web-enabled frontend for it. Sixthday is far enough along that this should take an afternoon. Letting customers access it will take another couple days though, because I need to think about the security issues. The only other issue is timing things - I can't restart a server every time someone makes a tiny change... Something needs to be check for changes every couple hours and then restart the servers if necessary. Which means I need an event log or audit trail. Another couple days to work that out. And then I'm in business!
Yep... If I can stay focused, the cornerhost control panel will be ready by the end of the month!