I have been working throughout the weekend on the CMS scripts, trying to heave them a bit closer to the finish line that says “feature complete” - but of course that line is going to be one that edges a bit further away each time you get closer to it.
Will CMS ever be finished? Who knows… All I know at the moment is that I am really, really tired.
While working on the scripts yesterday evening I got to a point in the code where I had to test it, and then remembered that my normal webspace is running PHP in “Safe Mode”. After a bit of head banging, I dug out my old laptop, and started installing a Linux partition on it.
By 9pm last night I was back in the game, with a little Linux server connected to the wireless network here at home, and all the typical server processes up, running and talking to one another - Apache, MySQL, PHP, and SSH. I installed a couple of minimal window managers too for fun (although I haven’t actually fired X up yet).
So here’s the shock for the Windows crowd - my little old laptop is a 366Mhz Pentium 2 with 192Mb of RAM. It quite happily runs the latest Linux kernel with the latest versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP and SSH. It does all that and has 30Mb of memory to spare. The processory occaisionally breaks the 5% usage mark, and the swapfile is not being touched at all. Can you possibly imagine running WindowsXP with IIS, SQL Server, ASP and and SSH server on such meagre hardware… it would die just after installing XP, let alone not need any disk swapping what-so-ever.
I finally packed up last night at about 00:30, and got up and started again this morning at about 10:00 - and then stayed in touch with a colleague all day as he worked on integrating what I have been doing into his project at our work offices a few miles down the road.
I finally wrapped the code up (in it’s unfinished state) this afternoon, and am having Sunday evening to myself. Well… I might mess around with the Linux box now I have one to play with, but that’s just the geek in me wanting to have a fiddle 8)
Time to go make something to eat…