Warning, I geek out again. If that’s not your thing, ponder this. They tail-gate for the Puppy Bowl. (And they sell DVDs of the Puppy Bowl. Lookout Netflix queue.)

Today I made a newsgroup post about the Computing Habitat Programming Competition inviting students to identify some bug/shortcoming/nuisance in their environment, and propose a programming project to fix it.

That inspired me to finally do some AJAX learning and coding to improve some of the web interfaces I deal with several times a day. While I don’t have a final product yet, I have a small framework and two CGI scripts that work with a simple form to do asynchronous lookups. After about an hour’s worth of experimenting, wow. I can see why sysadmins would like AJAX. It has this dirty, kludgy feel that, when applied properly is extremely effective. I’m scared what to think would happen if I learned YUI.

I’m also seeing, from tailing the logs, why people tend to put AJAX traffic on independent virtualhosts. This could get noisey. This also sounds like a good candidate for FastCGI, or some sort of already-running-process-hand-off because I’m sure the work to build the CGI environment, setup perl and DBI, and do the query is way longer than what I need. Maybe I should be doing this in PHP.

I think I plan on implementing these as greasemonkey scripts, so I have a little more work to do before things are “ready.” The first script, when I’m registering a new system in our DNS/DHCP/system database, does a OUI lookup on the MAC address and tells me (in place) who the vendor of the MAC is. (This is useful for several reasons — such as identifying VMware “machine” requests versus real ones, OR knowing when Professor Soandso just got a new Mac versus a PC, OR knowing ahead of time the MAC the grad student gave me wasn’t Ethernet (for example, I got one today for 02:00:54:…. I’m fairly sure that’s not Ethernet. Maybe Bluetooth.)

The second script searches our existing MAC address database, and tells me right away if I try to register a MAC address that’s already in the system.

I can’t wait to put these to use, and learn more AJAX. I hope the students are as productive with the CHPC as I am!