About this page

If you ever wondered how this page is run, this is the right place.

The Name

Just realized that I didn't explain the name of this page. "Caladan" is a reference to Dune (the books by Frank Herbert, of course), since I am a terribly devout Dune fan. If you know Dune, you'll remember it as the home planet of House Atreides.

I've seen the movie, and I personally liked it. It's a little off, but Dune is such a hard story to capture. The new TV miniseries is a lot more reordered, and has a few quirks, but was terrific. The new "Dune" books, written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson, are so different from the original work as to not really be "Dune" books at all. The stories are thinly told, and conventions of the main series are completely broken ("I go now to Wallach IX"?!?! What's that all about! Chapterhouse Planet's location was a carefully guarded secret!! And they kill a worm in the first few chapters!!!). Bah, there's unfortunately some real plot behind it, enough to make me believe the claims of some original notes left, so I'm forced to read them (but I don't have to do so quickly, and I don't have to like it).

The computer games, well... Dune (the original game, which was an adventure game) was good, Dune II was good too but had little to nothing to do with the real Dune plot. Dune 2000 was just sad, adding nothing more than graphics and multi-select to Dune II, while losing a lot of important abilities and totally munging game balance.

The new "Children of Dune" miniseries was *amazing*. About the only complaint I had was that Leto wasn't totally enveloped in the wormskin when he started getting superpowers. Other than that, *wow*. Still, I found something vaguely disturbing about having the same actress play Lady Jessica as played the Borg Queen (Alice Krige).

Interestingly enough, the rave band Dune also happens to be one of my absolute favorite bands. A streaming station where they can occasionally be heard is linked on my main page.

Construction

The very first version of this page was, much to my shame, started in Netscape Composer. Nasty program. The point was mostly that I wanted a quick layout that I could hack around with. The page template was done in Netscape, and so were the original verions of the main-page tables.

I quickly switched to Vim. I'm personally using Vim 6.1 at the moment, wonderful little text editor. Vim is just like the old UNIX 'vi' with a few really nice additions (visual hilight and syntax coloring are two I personally rely on). I now do all my actual HTML in Vim.

When I eventually learned table syntax properly, I ended up with a few decent pages. The nTec build system page was the first thing I whipped up, then the new version of the main page (for the few of you who were here before the new version, I'm sure you notice the difference). Then I added the guestbook, mostly because I knew CGI better than HTML. I love Python.

Next, I replaced the old, conventional HTML codebase with an HTML macro language called htmlincl. It made my job a LOT easier, and had a reasonable impact on the page layout itself.

Finally, most recently I moved the entire page to PHP. I ended up picking up so many nifty tricks with PHP from work that the page is now totally PHP-based. I also learned a lot about Cascading Style Sheets, which are now used heavily for a lot of the page layout. The page should even be somewhat better behaved as a result.

Hosting

This page is hosted on a really big dedicated web-server (giggle).

Well, actually, it's hosted on a dedicated server, but it's a P200MMX with 64MB of RAM. The system is running Linux and Apache. It's plugged into my home ADSL line, and it automagically updates a dynamic DNS to match the actual IP. On Dec. 31, 2001, I had 3000 hits in two days, thanks to a small episode of Slashdot Effect. My server managed to handle it without even slowing down.

Page Compatibility

This page is tested in Konqueror 3.1 (I no longer use Netscape 4.75 as my primary browser), but all the content should be visible on any browser that supports tables. Use is made of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS2), and browsers supporting this standard will find it benefits the viewing experience.

There is now a tiny amount of Javascript on this page to drive the new image window, but it is designed to be as non-critical as possible.

I know that Links displays this page fairly well. This is quite a step in the direction of "viewable by any browser", since it is a console-mode browser, so I'm pretty pleased.

All material on these pages is Copyright (c) Jennifer E. Elaan.