Steven Eppler's Blog » web hosting and design

WebTester 5.0 Released

eppler — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:08:29 +0000

The newest version of WebTester, my online testing and quizzing software, has been released, along with a completely new site re-design. You can check out the site here:

WebTester Home

Feel free to check out the newly created forums:

WebTester Forums

Or, you can log into the demo, using the following information:

Username: admin
Password: admin

WebTester Admin
WebTester Engine

Take a look and tell me what you think.

Resource Temporarily Unavailable with cPanel and TeamSpeak

eppler — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 21:55:00 +0000

One of my friends, Jeremy Bergen, is running a TeamSpeak server on one of my servers, and was running into a resource temporarily unavailable while ssh’d into the box. The TeamSpeak server was also randomly shutting down, and this may have been caused by the same error. TeamSpeak uses around between 10-16 processes itself, so after a logging in a few times or doing other things, this default limit of 20 it reached.

To fix this, first I turned off cPanel’s built in ‘Prevent Shell Fork Bomb Protection’. Then, I edited the /etc/security/limits.conf. I still wanted users to be limited to 20 processes, except for the TeamSpeak user which I wanted to have 40, and root which I wanted unlimited. Here are the lines that I had:

*             soft     nproc     20
jeremy        soft     nproc     40
root          soft     nproc     unlimited

Of course, you can customize the file however you like. The key is turning off cPanel’s internal protection so your box will use this file. Also, I happen to use CentOS 4.3.

WebTester Update

eppler — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 02:28:22 +0000

As posted previously, I have been working on porting my WebTester program from ASP to PHP. New features include:

Ability to randomize questions
Integrated HTML Editor (no more manual coding)
‘Enter’ key selects Next instead of Previous
Ported from ASP to PHP (so it can be hosted on a Mac/Linux/Windows box, instead of limited to Windows/IIS)
Generates math equations on the fly, by converting LaTeX math code into a graphic, such as:
General UI enhancements

To give it a spin, try out the test server. Here are the addresses:

Take a test: http://webtester.epplersoft.com
Administration: http://webtester.epplersoft.com/admin

The username/password combination to use is: demo/demo

This is not the final, so bugs may exist that have already been fixed. To generate math while creating a test, use the following format:

[tex]a^2 + b^2 = c^2[/tex]

The above will generate this image:

To create your own equations, you can try out a program called MathType by Design Science. I will also list other LaTeX generating programs as I find them.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment.

WebTester

eppler — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 15:36:19 +0000

Recently I’ve been working on porting my WebTester project from ASP to PHP. While doing this I have also been adding new features and fixing bugs as I come across them. New items include:

Ability to randomize questions
Integrated HTML Editor (no more manual coding)
‘Enter’ key selects Next instead of Previous
Ported from ASP to PHP (so it can be hosted on a Mac/Linux/Windows box, instead of limited to Windows/IIS)
Each admin user will only see tests created by that user (except for a super-admin)

It should be finished soon and will be used by Delta County Schools.

Real Estate made easy

eppler — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 20:09:52 +0000

Matthew and I just finished a site for a local customer. You can check it out at WestMarkBrokers.com.

At first, a real estate site seems kind of complex, but thanks to the folks over at Open-Realty, we were able to come up with a workable design and very functional site. There were a few bugs that we had to iron out, but after that the design went pretty smoothly.

Of course, this is all being hosted with my web hosting company.