What was supposed to be a simple project of wrapping the bulletin board software with an ActiveX wrapper (in order to provide visual and functional consistency with the left-column and navigation elements of the web site) turned into a week from Hades. However, it now seems to be completely working. The Perl UltimateBB process has been subjugated to the primary ASP code via a COM wrapper called ExecCGI which I implemented. This engine can synchronously execute any arbitrary console executable (supplying its environment, command line, and stdin), and return its stdout and stderr. The stdout (HTML) is then parsed into chunks which are integrated into the ASP pages. Let me know if you want to use this COM object.

All of this works in cahoots with the new URL-remapping layer, which makes the whole operation transparent to the bulletin board. Heh.

One dead-end which wasted a particularly large amount of time was an attempt to use the swanky MSXML.XMLDOM 4.0 (XML Document Object Model) component to do the parsing step. This was promising at first, and worked for some of the message board pages, but then I discovered that some of the UltimateBB HTML pages are not "well-formed", and thus will not load into XMLDOM. I ended up having to give up on XMLDOM and wrote a crude, quick-n-dirty parser that doesn't care about well-formedness. The knowledge gained by messing around with XMLDOM will of course prove very useful in our upcoming XML upgrade initiative. And the performance penalty of using XMLDOM probably would have been severe.

The most difficult bug to track down was this: although the CGI environment block I established for the spawned executable included all the standard CGI HTTP headers, it did not include the Windows environment variable "SystemRoot", which is apparently referenced deep in the bowels of some Perl library (never did find the exact spot). From this I learned that if you don't know Perl, you really can't figure out how a given piece of Perl code works.

Fixed left-column refresh weirdness.

Added staff photos to this site news page.

Created a new ActiveX object called "UBBU" which implements the "Now Online" status area.

Updated the IPLookup tool and improved its performance, by adding a non-blocking lookup API which fills the name cache lazily (the result can be picked up later; in the meantime, the numeric IP is shown in "Now Online"). Thus, the new feature has mimimal performance implications. Now using release builds of all these binaries.

Minor changes to site monitor, which also uses the IPLookup tool.

Minor tweaks to the site monitor suite. More IETF-DTD tweaks.

Uploaded 665 audio clips recorded by Mak.

Various optimizations should give a speed boost to this web site. To wit: live site monitor probe now tears off a thread and allows the ASP processing to continue asynchronously. Also switched to a non-debugging build of that probe. Most algorithmically-generated XLITs are now cached during initialization.

Upgraded message board software to UBB 6.5.0, enabled avatars.

Wrote and installed an ISAPI filter which provides the appearance of sub-dir oriented URLs.

Reverse-linked categories back from the categorized phrases/defs.

Initial work in implementing the categories feature. Also made a giant effort towards making our HTML code 100% compliant with IETF-DTD-4.01-strict. To this end, I spent all night rewriting the style sheet and removing many extra declarations throughout the site.

Misc. cleanup, merging, removing duplicates, fixing transliterations. Also added about 100 more entries.

Part 2 of Bryan's gigantic upload—total 18182 entries, and 871 new audio clips!

Fixed the ability to download ThaiNP.exe, which was not working ever since installing Perl to support the message boards.

Fixed a problem with long transliterations crashing the site.

Large update from Bryan includes a few hundred new audio recordings, images, many corrections, updates, and more. Much kudos to Bryan! Now 17854 entries.