Initial commit (a clone of the jsmachines project as of v1.15.3)

blog/2014/03/30/README.md

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+Running on Azure
+---
+Publishing a Node-based site to [Azure](http://azure.com) was painless, thanks to their friendly web portal and
+GitHub integration.  Getting a fully operational site, however, took a bit more time.
+
+Unfortunately, because Azure's underlying server technology is Windows-based (IIS), some of the same Windows/Unix
+portability problems that have plagued us for decades still plague us today: **carriage returns** and **backslashes**.
+
+Even though all PCjs text files in my project contain only linefeeds, IIS would serve them up with CR/LF
+instead.  I first noticed this on the client side, when an XML file retrieved via *XMLHttpRequest()* came back
+full of CR/LFs, and later on the server side, when *fs.readFile()* returned a Markdown file filled with CR/LFs.
+
+I wondered if the CR/LF transformation had happened when Azure pulled all my files from GitHub, because
+while I can understand some whitespace inconsistencies across web servers, I would never expect file system calls
+on the server to modify file contents.
+
+I finally confirmed that the files were indeed modified on the server, by using Azure's FTP browser.  For example,
+[minimal.xml](/configs/pc/keyboards/minimal.xml) is currently 622 bytes locally, but on the Azure server, the
+reported size is 632 bytes -- one extra CR for each of the file's 10 lines.  After a little more digging, I
+[learned something new](http://git-scm.com/book/ch7-1.html#Formatting-and-Whitespace) about **Git**: it has a
+setting called `core.autocrlf` which, for me on OS X, defaults to `input` (meaning "convert CR/LF to LF on commit
+but do NOT convert LF back to CR/LF on check-out").  But Azure apparently sets this to `true`, causing all LFs to be
+converted to CR/LF.
+
+Regarding slashes, even when path components contained only slashes, *path.join()* would return paths with
+backslashes.  And unfortunately, this behavior varies from Node module to module.  For example, I use the NPM
+[glob](https://www.npmjs.org/package/glob) module, and even when the input path to *glob()* contains backslashes,
+its output paths do not.
+
+In the process of fixing those portability issues, I also had some trouble getting Azure logging to work as
+documented.  Setting `loggingEnabled: true` in **/IISNode.yml** would generate logs in **/site/wwwroot/iisnode/**,
+but the logs were numerous and poorly organized.
+
+And the Azure command-line tool that was *supposed* to enable real-time log-streaming to the console:
+
+	azure site log tail pcjs
+	
+would happily report:
+
+	Welcome, you are now connected to log-streaming service
+	
+but it would NEVER display anything but deployment information.  Instead, I had to browse the log files using Azure's
+"FTP DIAGNOSTIC LOGS" link on the web portal -- which presents the logs as one big, ugly, fragmented mess:
+ 
+![Azure Logs](iisnode_logs.png)
+
+Sigh. But at least the site is up and fully operational now.
+
+*[@jeffpar](http://twitter.com/jeffpar)*  
+*March 30, 2014*