On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:03:00 -0700 (MST), mso@oz.net  wrote:
> The main problem with the wiki is it's not well publicized.  Nowhere on
> the main Quixote page is it listed.  I only learned about it from this
> list.  There is a link from the quixote.ca site, but you wouldn't realize
> that looking at Quixote's home page, which only says, "There is also an
> introduction and a set of tutorials on the quixote.ca web site."  (BTW,
> there's also no explanation of why quixote.ca exists, how official its
> status is, or whether it's as up to date as the main site.)
>
> If we do put demo entries and documentation on the wiki, we should have a
> standard prominent place to date the entries (e.g., just below the title).
>  Then people will know to take pages that haven't been updated in six
> months with a grain of salt.
>
> Could we also have an FTP directory somewhere to upload demo/doc tarballs
> so I don't have to commit to keeping my computer on 24 hours?

+1 on the above points. Also, notice that there are people without a flat rate
Internet connection: they would be better served by documentation included
in the Quixote distribution. Including the (best of the) Wiki in the docs could
be an idea.

>  I had to hack in query-string
> preservation because some of my pages depend on query variables.  That led
> to the problem that logging in and out repeatedly on the same page, or
> pressing the browser's Back button, can result in URLs like:
>     ?login=1&logout=1
> That can cause unpredictable behavior depending on how exactly the login
> routine examines it.  Pressing the Back button can also get you to a page
> that says you're logged in when you're not, or even reinstates your login
> status unexpectedly.  Having multiple sets of query variables in the same
> request, each used by a different function, is difficult to maintain.  So
> I'm undecided whether to keep this or to switch to a simpler login scheme
> that takes you to a standalone login page and then redirects to the home
> page.  I've tried messing with HTTP_REFERER but it's another thing that
> works sometimes but now always.

Uhm ... This reminds me of "The back button is not your friend", by Steve
Holden:

http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/18/Setting_A_Context.pdf

> Regarding uploading large files through the web, even if you can, do you
> really want to?  First you'll have to make sure the webserver and all the
> browsers involved can support it and aren't configured to reject it.  Then
> there's the time to upload and the possibility of it aborting in the
> middle, although if it's on a LAN these may not be significant.  But how
> would you resume an upload if it was aborted?  Then there's the efficiency
> issue: the browser has to base64-encode the file, making it larger than it
> is, and the server has to decode it.  It often works better in a LAN to
> put the file in a network-mounted directory and have the server pick it
> up, either triggered by a web request or automatically by a cron job.

You are right on all points, of course. There were two reasons for my inquiry:
1) I wanted to know; 2) I had to copy a big file from a WinXP laptop to a Linux
machine, Samba was not properly configurated, installing WinSCP
or something else on the laptop was not an option and I wondered if
uploading the file was a viable option. The answers seems to be yes.

BTW, this is completely off-topic, but I have discovered that WinXP Home
(at least on three different laptops I tried) set a limit on the download speed,
i.e. even if the LAN speed is 10 MB/s I can download only at 100 KB/s or
something like it. There is no such a problem with Win98 or Win2000.
Does somebody has any idea about how to solve this?

               Michele