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December 15, 2004 02:07 I'm going to spend part of tomorrow morning cutting random wires to see what happens. In other words, I'm going to take a perfectly working set of programs and make a major change, and as always, I expect that absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong. Right. For those who care, the change in question is a modification to all the programs that access the cam database. Currently, each program accesses the file directly. Reading, writing, appending and all that enjoyable stuff. It's all done directly by the individual programs. This sounds like a perfectly acceptable option, and certainly has been for now. But things are changing, and so therefore shall the programs. First off, there is currently no easy way to lock the database. Most of the time this is unnecessary, but there are a couple critical sections where it could be useful. Secondly, I'm going to be accessing multiple databases of cams. The cams exclusive to this site will be merged with cams from other sites that don't communicate with my server for activation, etc. Since all of these will be handled differently, I'm going to keep them separated. What the server can provide is a single interface to seamlessly access all the different databases. I COULD do this from a library call without going through a server, but hey, humor me here. :) With the database accessed via a server, I can have clients on systems other than the main server access the database directly. I've yet to have an application which requires this, but I can forsee possibilities for it. The server can also keep currently active cams in memory, so functions that currently pass through the entire database to search for active cams can have their profile reduced. As the total number of cams climbs into the thousands, this will become more important. Anyway, just wanted to let you know, tomorrow, things might be screwy. Now you know why. Of course, I might still be sleeping at the time it all goes wrong, in which case, I take no responsibility. I've changed nothing yet. Really. :)
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