Web Standards

I use XHTML 1.0 Transitional with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS2) to produce these pages and the on-line XHTML Validator and CSS Validator to make sure that the pages are displayable by as many browsers as possible.

Motivation

You know how easy it is to lose touch with friends, family, and all the important people who make up your life? Well, it's a connected world now and we no longer have an excuse to let good friendships drift away. The White Spot (North) is my attempt to keep all the people in my life up-to-date on what's going on with me and all of us, any time, even if we can't get together as often as we'd like for reasons of time or distance.

The White Spot diner in Charlottesville, VA was a gathering place for my college buddies and me during some of the best times of my life. I now live north of it, but the name captures the essence of these pages: a place where old and new friends can gather, have a couple of laughs, and keep in touch with each other.

I frequently get asked about my web pages, the WS(N) servers, and what I need to get all this up and running. Here's a start.

Dell Studio XPS 435T Hardware and Software

Since mid-2009, the WS(N) server has been a Dell Studio XPS 435T workstation, replacing the Sun W1100z that had been doing the job so well since 2005.

Here are some specifics about the WS(N) server:

  • Intel Core i72.66GHz Intel© Core™ i7-920 processor with 4 cores / 8 threads
  • 6GB of tri-channel DDR3 SDRAM memory @ 1066MHz
  • 16X SATA CD / DVD±RW burner
  • 500GB of mirrored SATA hard disk space
WHITE SPOT (NORTH) SOFTWARE
Operating System OpenSolaris
Web Server Apache
FTP Server Washington University FTP
Mailing Lists GNU Mailman
Web Design Adobe® Dreamweaver® CS4
Graphics and Photos Adobe® Photoshop® CS4
Video Formatting Adobe® Flash® CS4
Video Editing Apple Final Cut Studio 2
Slideshows XML Flash Slideshow v3

A list of software I use to put together these pages is shown at the right. My Apple MacBook is a constant companion, and all of the photographs and videos are done on that. I have been running some form of UNIX© on almost every personal computer I've ever owned, and I would never trust the serving of these pages to anything else but OpenSolaris.

Internet Infrastructure

I'm connected to the Internet through Verizon FiOS. I've owned the domain name wspot.net since 2002, which is currently served by DynDNS.com.

Fun Stuff

SETI@Home My server spends most of its time doing nothing, so when it's got some spare time, it participates in the SETI@Home project. SETI@Home ("Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence") is a grid of Internet-connected computers that donates spare compute cycles to look for extraterrestrial life. Every so often, the server downloads some radio telescope data collected from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and starts looking for patterns that might indicate the presence of little green men. If you're interested, you can see how much compute time I've contributed to the project over the years or learn more about SETI@Home.

By the way, SETI@Home is just one of the many compute grid projects managed by the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing software. Others projects include work for curing diseases like malaria and HIV, mathematical problems, and climate research. If you see anything that appeals to you, you can donate your own computer's spare cycles for a worthy cause.