Saturday evening…

So, what am I doing here sitting at my desk at work?

Well, I’m certainly not working, that’s for sure.

In
fact I’m attempting to create a gallery of pitcures on a web page and it’s
far more convenient to transport the pictures here on a ZIP disk than spend
days uploading them via the modem. It’s also far simpler to play with the
images and things locally than over a slow modem link.

I’m not using
the Gallery PHP script things ‘cos our web server won’t run it (it needs
the rewrite module and we have this disabled and we don’t allow user CGI
scripting for security reasons. So, I’m using the KDE 3.0 thumbnail stuff
and then re-writing the page produced by that.

You can have a look at the results here and here.

Anyway, what’s been happening this week?

Well,
I’ve been very busy witht he department opendays, Wednesday was the teachers
openday and thursday & friday were the student ones. It would have helped
if the whole design and installation hadn’t happened on tuesday afternoon,
so I had to stay ’til 8pm to get the machiens moved, in place, reconfigured
etc. ready for the wednesday morning.

Wednesday evening was spent
at the departmental not-the-undergraduate-annual-dinner, which isn’t actually
annual yet as this was the first one.. quite fun.

The rest of the week has been a bit of a blur due to lack of sleep from tuesday wednesday etc. Oh well.

Anyway, enjoy the photos.. all made using my new camera, of course.

6 thoughts on “Saturday evening…

  1. Security, or ease of job?

    I just noticed in your post a couple of things that surprise me. You mention that you don’t allow user CGI scripts for security reasons.

    1) Isn’t this part of the learning environment? As such, I would not expect the sensitivity classification of the information held on the machine(s) concerned to be that high. As such, I wonder whether this is a security issue, or an ease-of-job issue.

    2) My ISP allows me shell access, CGI scripts, and even DBA access if I want on the webserver I use for lacunae.org. They also allow me to use rewrite, hence http://www.lacunae.org/gallery. My guess is that the security threats they face have some commonality with yours, in fact they may well be a superset. So I would surmise that it is possible to allow user CGI without compromising security, obviously this depends on the policy, and sensitivity of the data held on your system.

    • Re: Security, or ease of job?

      Well, it was a decision made when we set up the web server that only very thoroughly vetted code would be allowed to run on the web server which was accessable from outside. The server runs a number of colaborative data stores for scientific data, so it is a valuable resource. There are no user accounts on the machine either, it’s as locked down as it can be, hence the lack of rewrite and user cgi scripting. The web server is also totally untrusted with our network and doesn’t trust anything from within our network either.

      The internal web server, however, allows user cgi scripting etc.

  2. suggestion

    Lower the pixel density of the images – either when you take them, or when you put them up on the web server. They’re a bit too big to load comfortably, and your audience are unlikely to be making posters off the web 🙂

    • Re: suggestion

      I had asked the thing which produced the web page to put the file sizes on the page, but it didn’t do it.

      The web pages themselves are more for my internal use and just happen to be accessable from outside, which is why I didn’t sub-sample them in the first place.

      Maybe, next time, I’ll have less pictures across the page and make the thumbnails double the size so people don’t have to download the whole image as the thumbnail would be big enough.

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