9-Oct-2001 T:= 22:46
Webserver has been changed to Win32 based Apache. httpsvr worked
quite well, but I wasn't up to upgrading program to do what I
wanted. Besdies, there was already a webserver for Win32 in the
form of Apache, and I didn't have time to reinvent the wheel.
The other big reason to go to Apache is that Apache is multithreaded
whereas httpsvr was not. This website doesn't get a lot of traffic,
but I have been using it to provide large mp3 files and other
large files for friends of mine to upload. During the time that
one of these files was being transferred with httpsvr, all other
http requests to the site would be blocked. This is no longer
the case with Apache. As I plan on running a web cam through this
site so I can look at my office remotely, a multithreaded server
was essential.
July 2001
Right now we are in the process of transferring this site from
being hosted by Telus (the location you get to when you use http://www.fingertapping.com/)
to my office computer, Hal9000, which will be the final location
of the site. The only advantage of the Telus hosted site is that
it is reliable; Telus web sites are limited to a total of 5 Mb
of files which may have seemed large in 1990, but is ridiculously
small in 2001. Our office computers allow us to allocate gigabytes
of disk storage for web data and thus allow us to do things like
put your CT scan or MRI scan
images in a private directory which you can peruse at home
on your computer. Fingertapping.com will eventually be forwarded
to 216.232.4.187 for the online neurology project.
To find out how long this machine has been online, click here. The page you get should be updated every 15 seconds if the program which does the page updating is running. This is just a test of creating web pages in Visual Basic and will likely be replaced by something fancier soon (Added on 25/6/2001)
If you just require information about our practice like office hours, telephone numbers, etc, use the telus site whose URL is given here. This site is upgraded intermittently so the information may be a few months old, but you'll be able to access it 365 days/year whereas Hal9000 presently runs under Win95; reliability is not a feature of this OS. Also, the Hal9000 webserver is the Micro$oft test program HTTPSRV (which you will find in the samples/mfc/internet/httpsrv directory on the Visual C msdn library CD if you're interesting in playing with it). Apache it ain't, but right now I don't have time to setup a linux box in my office to run Apache and also serve as an internet proxy server. Also, since all the programs I will be distributing for the online neurology project are written in Visual Basic, I still have need of the inferior Win32 development environment for now. I'll be hacking HTTPSRV considerably in the next few months, and I'd be interested in any feedback as to whether things that worked on your web browser in one version of HTTPSRV don't work in a future version.
There isn't much to creating a webserver as I noticed in perusing HTTPSRV code, and if traffic on this site is fairly light, it is likely to be all that I will need for some time. One of the reasons to go to something like Apache is that its performance is much better in high traffic situations. I don't think this will happen for a while, but if it does I'll have an excuse to upgrade my office system to a 1 GHz Athlon from the 375 MHz AMD K6/2 that I currently use.
Note: This site is still pretty buggy since there are links to telus hosted site in some pages, and it is annoying having to update multiple instances of a form which exist in at least 3 separate locations. I've also been playing around with this site on my home network as this is the only way that I can see how it looks on an early version of Netscape running on a Mac IIvx (there host is a 900 MHz Athlon system). If you run across any inconsistencies, let me know at borisg@unixg.ubc.ca so I can correct them.