I’m linking to another article on Technology Dependence since the outage the other day woke a lot of people up to the growing reliance on technology of our modern world.
Patrice Lewis speaks only of the computer outage and that along had a tremendous effect.
Just imagine if it was computers, power, water, communications, transportation and everything else… and pretty much permanent.
https://www.wnd.com/2024/07/when-the-world-grinds-to-a-halt/
The Librarian
One of the site’s Users, Guy, reminded me of this story. I saw it the other day, intended to post it and then got distracted by other projects.
There was an X-14 class Solar Flare and CME on July 23. Fortunately it was on the far side of the sun and only observed by satellites. The Carrington Event is estimated to have been in the X15+ range. That’s the one that set telegraph lines on fire and cause Auroras seen almost to the Equator.
Such an event today would likely destroy or extensively damage power grids worldwide requiring years if not decades to repair… if such repair was even possible. In all likelihood such an event would destroy the world’s technological and industrial infrastructure permanently requiring the survivors to rebuild from scratch.
The Sunspot which produced that event will be rotating around to face Earth late next week or early the following week.
The Librarian
This week saw a major outage across a wide range of businesses due to a single software bug in a single piece of software. Airlines stopped moving, factories stopped producing, hospitals stopped performing procedures.
Yet the IT industries response is that it was simply to great a dependence on a single company rather than being more… diverse I suppose.
In the event of a Carrington Event level EMP every one of these industries and businesses will cease functioning due to irreversible hardware damage to unprotected computers and won’t restart.
If a day or two of computer downtime caused this much chaos imagine if ALL the computers go down and that it’s permanent.
https://www.breitbart.com/news/crowdstrike-crash-raises-questions-about-tech-dependency/
The Librarian
The Library files on the site have been copied over directly from the Master List. The Database of the books and links has been rebuilt directly from that list and imported.
There “shouldn’t” be any more missing files or bad book links. If you do run across any please let me know.
And the .zip files have been rebuilt. One day before too long I’m going to take some of the larger ones like the Scientific American and the Radio 73 ones and break them into smaller sets to make downloading easier. Since those Categories are static and not likely to change they don’t have to be rebuilt when new files are added.
The Librarian
I’m working on getting the Files and Categories synced properly. Making sure that:
That was an almost impossible task on the old site since it was purely manual and errors crept in over the years and were hard to track down. I spent much of today checking the Master List of files, recompiling a full list, ensuring the names were regularized and then built a new list for the site.
I’m going to be recopying the files from the Master List to a Server drive, rebuilding the .ZIP files for each category then moving them onto the Website Server. Once I get them moved I’ll swap out the Library directory with the new one and reimport the Files database.
I won’t need to take the site down but it may be a bit sluggish during the file copying.
The Librarian
There was a corrupted PDF of the Savage Cub Bolt Action Rifle manual in the firearms Category. I was never able to find a good copy of it but Mack, one of the site Users, found a copy and sent it to me.
The corrected file has been put in the library and the date update to today to make ii easy to find for anyone interested.
Thanks Mack.
The Librarian
It was suggested that I add a Category Column to the Search Pages to make it easier to save Books to the proper category.
Done.
It makes the tables much wider than the page layout but… hey… I’m not particularly worried about the sites “appearance” as long as it does what it needs to do.
The Librarian
I’ve added a Date Range Search to the top of the Main Index. It lets you see what has been added in the last 30, 60, 90 and 180 days. Much simpler and easier than all the coding required to enter a specific date and then handle all the possible error conditions.
It’s supposed to sort them title but doesn’t. Since it’s easy enough to just click on Title or Date to resort the list however you like I’m not going to spend a lot of time tracking down why it doesn’t. I might get around to that sometime soon. Oh and it excludes Zip Files which are in every Category now. When ever I add new books to a category I’ll rebuild that Category’s Zip File
So… Search is in. Zip Files are in. Dynamic Tables are in to make it easier to add books. Comments are disabled so I don’t have to spend time dealing with Spam.
FINALLY I can go back to looking for new books, cleaning up ones I already have downloaded, looking for missing books in partial collections and get back to work on some printing/binding projects that have been on hold for a while.
The Librarian
As I half expected 90% of the comments left on the site have been spam. That’s pretty much the norm on the internet these days but the only way to avoid it is to load down the site with heavy spam filtering plugins and all sorts of bot filtering addons.
I don’t really care about the spam as much as I care about having to waste 10-20 minutes every morning having to wade through the dreck, deleting spam, to find the few real communications.
Easier to simply turn it off. My email address is posted on the Contact Me page and I’m always welcome email from folks interested in the books or the site.
The Librarian
Dynamic Tables are in. Some of them span too far to the right due to some long file names. I’ll get that fixed soon. But they work and that is the main point.
Zips files have been added in each category. I prefixed the file name with aaa- in the index so it will sort to the top or bottom and not be embedded in the list. The actual file does not have the prefix and the zips contain the folder name and the files under it and not just the raw files to make organizing them simpler.
I’ll get the search pages added in the next few days.
The Librarian
I’ve gotten the Dynamic Tables Plugin working properly and will be replacing all of the current Category Indexes with Dynamic tables. They will look pretty much the same but will pull data directly from the database when the page loads so they will always be current and new files can be added much more easily than the old static tables.
The Dynamic tables will also make the Search for recent files simpler since they can use a simple database query.
Now that I’m not longer on a hosting service that throttles bandwidth, blocks IPs that download too much and otherwise make posting .zip files useless I’m going to be adding a zip file in each category that will allow you to download the entire category as a single file.
Since this is our primary fiber line and my wife uses it for her job I have to ensure that the line is not saturated by downloads. To that end I’ll be monitoring the bandwidth use by the website and if it gets too high I’ll have to set a limit on it. Just have to see how many people try to download those files simultaneously.
If there are no bandwidth problems I’ll probably add a torrent link as well.
The Librarian