|
|
This document describes how we built our site.
It mentions some of the usability and design principles we used
to build this site and the people (wetware), machinery (hardware)
and computer tools (software) behind it.
Below, in this document:
- Feedback and questions
A web site is never finished, so we look forward to hearing from
users: your feedback is appreciated!
- Usability and design principles
We used a number of usability and design guidelines to make a
site that is, hopefully, easy to navigate through, informative
and, in short: usable.
- The Wetware
The people behind the web site.
- The Hardware
A general description of the hardware we used.
- The Software
Some of the software tools we used and the importance
of open source software.
Top of this document.
[Back to contents]
If you have any questions or remarks about our site or software,
please do not hesitate to contact us.
Your feedback will be much appreciated and you will, if appropiate,
receive an answer as soon as possible!
[Back to contents]
The neuroMod
and Human Memory site have
been designed according to a number of web usability guidelines
as described by Jakob Nielsen in his book
Designing Web
Usability: The Practice of Simplicity.
By trying to adhere as closely as possible to Nielsen's web usability
guidelines, we hope our sites are perceived as usable.
This site is best viewed with style sheet (CSS) support enabled,
as is the default for recent versions of the major graphical browsers.
But you should also get an adequate rendering with Lynx.
[Back to contents]
The people who administer this site are:
- Robert Berg (former staff)
Did the layout and was editor and Zope administrator.
Did Walnut and Nutshell program development.
- Eric Maryniak
Editor, Zope and system administrator.
Coordinator of program development and open sourcing.
System and network administration.
- Jaap Murre
Project leader and editor-in-chief.
The project home pages are maintained by the respective owners.
[Back to contents]
The server runs on the following hardware:
- Dual Intel Pentium III (600 MHz, 100 MHz bus), 1 Gb RAM.
- Two 18 Gb Ultra2 SCSI disks (80 Mbit/sec).
Furthermore, a regular atapi cdrom (40x), network card (3COM 3c905b),
floppy drive and scsi tape streamer is used.
This rather "regular" PC hardware setup has proven to be very stable,
affordable and well performing.
There has been no unscheduled downtime since the server became
operational in march 2000, which is also thanks to Linux, that has
proven to be a very stable operating system.
[Back to contents]
This site was developed almost entirely with
OpenSource
software.
Among the
reasons for using
open source software are:
- Better quality
Especially the widely used and popular software tools,
such as Linux, Apache and Python are top quality products
that are often of better quality, thanks to review by programmers
world wide.
- Better support
Support for open source software is better (and free!), thanks
to prompt responsiveness by the developers or expert users on
mailing lists and news groups, who often consider it a matter
of honor to make their product top quality.
- Vendor independence
There is no risk of vendor lock-in when using open source software.
- Verifiability and changeability
Quality of open source software can be independently verified by
the user (a common precondition in scientific research) by inspecting
the source code. Moreover, source code can be changed or adapted to
fix bugs or fit the software to one's personal needs.
The research community is already using open source for a long time, e.g.
the so called GNU tools, among which
the popular Gnu C/C++ compiler, are used by universities worldwide.
But lately, these advantages are realized by more and more commercial
companies and governments, including the
Dutch Ministery of Economic Affairs
(see e.g.
SWAP-magazine
april 1999) that published a report of a study carried out by
IDC (International Data Corporation)
titled:
The European Commission IDA
(Interchange of Data between Administrations) has published:
Some of the popular web sites that have information on open source
software are
Slashdot (news),
freshmeat (software announcements),
OSDN (Open Source Developers Network)
and OpenSource.org.
Among the many, many software packages we gratefully use, are:
 
|
SuSE
GNU/Linux
|
Linux, ©
Linus Torvalds,
is a
free
and very robust
Unix operating system.
It is available under the
GNU General Public
License ("GPL") from the
Free Software Foundation.
|
|
Apache
|
Both our sites,
neuroMod and
Human Memory are
served as so called virtual hosts by the
Apache
web server. Furthermore, a number of internal hosts
are also served as virtual host (i.e. on the same
physical machine) by Apache.
|
|
|
Zope
|
Although all web access to our site goes first through
Apache (for reasons
of uniform logging and security), access to our public
sites, neuroMod and
Human Memory, is
dispatched to Zope.
Zope has turned out to be a very convenient web content
management system that allows a centrally managed house
style, while at the same time delegating control over
project folders to their respective owners and managers
(editors). Furthermore, it has a powerful object oriented
scripting functionality and can be used to access SQL
databases (MySQL
in our case).
|
|
MySQL
|
MySQL is the SQL
database server we use for various projects on our
web sites and can easily be interfaced with
Zope.
|
|
Samba
|
Samba is used as a
network file and print server and in fact turns a Unix
server into a Microsoft Windows file server with no
perceivable functional difference to the user, who can
easily access network drives under Windows as if they
were present on, say, an NT server.
|
|
Postfix
|
Postfix is a so
called message transport agent (mta).
We do not use the more familiar and well known mta
sendmail, because,
in our view, Postfix provides more security, easier
configurability and speed than sendmail.
|
  
|
XFree86,
KDE and
Gnome
|
When graphically working under Linux with the free
X Window System
XFree86,
both the
KDE
and
Gnome
desktop environments are used.
|
|
Python
|
Python,
see also the original
www.Python.org site,
is a very portable, versatile, easy to learn and well
engineered object oriented programming language.
|
|
Perl
|
The Perl scripting language
is mainly used internally for various administrative tasks and
text file conversions. Furthermore,
Bugzilla
is implemented in Perl.
|
 
|
CVS and
WinCVS
|
CVS, or
Concurrent Versions System, is the popular open-source,
network-transparent, version control system we use for our
software projects (such as
Walnut and
Nutshell).
WinCVS
is a Windows front end to CVS.
|
|
Bugzilla
|
Bugzilla
is used as our internal Problem Management system.
A "problem" can be anything, not necessarily a problem,
but in fact any "issue", such as software bugs
(e.g. in Walnut or Nutshell), problems with our online
databases (e.g. Geppetto), enhancement requests
(e.g. new software or web site features) and issues about
the web site (typo's, missing or incorrect information).
Bugzilla has many features and is very powerful, but does
require some administrative effort initially to set it up.
|
|
StarOffice
|
StarOffice
from OpenOffice.org is an open-source project sponsored by
Sun Microsystems.
It is a high quality and complete suite of Office applications
and is used to convert Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint
presentations to platform neutral or independent formats.
|
|
Webalizer
|
The Webalizer
is a fast, free web server log file analysis program.
It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in
HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.
|
Under Microsoft Windows (client PC's) we also use some OpenSource
software:
 
|
TeraTerm
and
TTSSH
|
TeraTerm
Pro is a superb free terminal emulator/telnet client for Windows.
TTSSH
adds SSH (secure shell)
capabilities to Teraterm Pro without sacrificing any of Teraterm's
existing functionality. Thanks to SSH, passwords will be encrypted
when logging in with Tera Term, thus solving a major shortcoming of
telnet.
|
There is also a number of commercial tools we use:
- VMware
With VMware you can run multiple virtual pc's on your physical pc.
So e.g. you can run a Windows 98 and Windows 2000 virtual pc within
a pc running Windows NT. Together with so called undoable virtual
disks, this powerful feature is used to test
Nutshell,
our neural network simulator, under different Windows versions and
as different users (Administrator, Power User, Restricted User, etc.)
and simply discard changes after testing. This way, you can safely
play around, e.g. let Nutshell overwrite system dll's and change
registry settings and simply reboot with a clean configuration you
had set up and saved previously.
- WinZip
WinZip and Winzip Self-Extractor are used to create compressed
Setup Wizards (created with InstallShield) that automatically start
installation after self-extraction.
|
University of Amsterdam