InterCAVE Network

Work pulled me away from finishing up the latest version of UserManager to check into an email issue.  After getting a forward of the bounced message, I got to work looking through logs and the queue’s status for that particular domain (its one of the few things that Exchange 2007 does that doesn’t offend me).  I pinged… Then I telneted to port 25…  Nothing.  It just wasn’t responding.

Of course, there might be a MX record to account for, so I did a nslookup as well.  Those servers didn’t respond either AND it appeared they use the same ISP that we do.  After contacting them through alternative means (GMail) and passing back and forth some information, it turns out that they no longer use our ISP but that some of the legacy settings still are lingering about.

This is one of those issues where both sides claim their systems work and are actually right.

Now, back to the code.

One of the simplest tasks when you are trying to optimize anything is to not repeat work.  In programming this is usually done by keeping a variable with the result to be used further down the line.  I’ve long pondered how to make these websites faster as they are all retrieved from databases.  One thought pertained to a CMS that was in development at the time.  Instead of having all the content copied from the database every time, it would only be necessary in edit mode.  Once you published a page, the underlying engine would write out a static page to the server so that there wouldn’t be any script time or database penalties. 

As a happy accident, a month or more ago I stumbled upon several PHP accelerators.  They work simply by storing the php code after it has been analyzed and converted to byte code.  If the script hasn’t been updated, there isn’t any reason to recompile…  Thus, there should be a speed up.  Will you notice it here????  Who knows…  Its just one more little tweak to make things smoother.

There are currently a few project pages on the website that are in hiding originally because there wasn’t a releasable product to go on them yet.  As stated before, there are several projects that have been written over the last few years that will make their debut to to world at large here.  I’ve decided to make some of those pages visible to get this party rolling. 

For now, the projects will be available sans source code.  I like and support the Open Source community.  It would be awesome to have someone help out on some of the projects.  But for now, I haven’t decided which license to use for the source code.

Changed the website ONCE AGAIN to better align with the idea that a developer blog should not be the headmast of the domain.  We’ve created a developer site at http://code.intercave.net that will detail finer grain things like milestone achievements and oggEngine project news.  We’ll post project information on this site for projects that are done, nearly done, or just available for download as they are.