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Sunday, October 8, 2017

The Hacker's Diet Online: Source Code Release Update

The Hacker's Diet Online has been in production at Fourmilab since July, 2007: more than ten years. It provides, in a Web application which can be accessed from any browser or mobile device with Web connectivity, a set of tools for planning, monitoring, and analysing the progress of a diet and subsequently maintaining a stable weight as described in my 1991 book The Hacker's Diet.

The application was originally hosted on Fourmilab's local server farm, but as of January, 2016, Fourmilab's Web site has been hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Due to changes in the server environment, a few modifications had to be made to the application, none of which are visible to the user. These changes were applied as “hot fixes” to the running code, and not integrated back into the master source code, which is maintained using the Literate Programming tool Nuweb.

I have just completed this integration and posted an updated version of the published program (1.4 Mb PDF) and downloadable source code (2.7 Mb tar.gz). The code generated from this program is identical to that running on the server, with the exception of passwords, encryption keys, and other security-related information which have been changed for the obvious reasons. A complete list of the changes in this release appears in the change log at the end of the published program.

The Hacker's Diet Online now has more than 30,000 open accounts, not counting completely inactive accounts which never posted any data after being opened, which are archived and purged every few years.

Posted at October 8, 2017 20:14