I’m not really sure why I titled this post “On Any Sunday” - especially given it’s provenance as the title of a famous movie starry Steve McQueen about Motocross.
My day has been filled with frustration, hard work, banging my head against multiple brick walls, learning lots, reading huge swathes of technical material, and fighting with inane complexity. Most of the frustration comes from the fact that a virtual machine running a Linux LAMP server will not allow me to commit code directly to a Subversion source code repository via a Samba share. It’s probably a common problem, but I’m not about to go and sort it out. I’ve found a workflow for myself that evades things going wrong, and am sticking with it.
(for those who stumble across this post while trying to solve the VM + Linux + Samba + Vista + Subversion problem, I am copying the entire folder (a Joomla template) back to the Windows machine, then running “Clean Up”, and “Commit” on it, which seems to work).
I’ve been working on the taxonomy and template for a new website for somebody today - although I’ve hardly billed any of the actual time I spent, because I was unfamiliar with the latest version of the platform. A number of hours were spent poring over technical books about Joomla (content management system) - but the end result, a couple of hours ago was a really elegant solution that works as designed, and as it should - a rare thing.
If some idle part of your brain is wondering what on earth Subversion is (which I doubt, but I’ll carry on anyway), it’s a “version control system”. Think of it as a filing cabinet with a memory - so you can go back in time and see changes you made to a specific file. In a group situation it becomes far more interesting - you can have several people change the same file at the same time, and the filing cabinet will intelligently splice them back together. Us software developers rely on things like Subversion a lot.
Tomorrow I am working in the normal company offices. After nearly two years working for the client in London, the network issues we have always suffered have been solved by a rather clever chap in the office. Turns out the load balancer on the network was being too clever by half, and throwing half of my computer’s conversation with the other end out into nowhereville. Cheers.
Going back into the office means I will once more be departing on the school run with the children in the morning - and spearing off through town atop my mountain bike to visit the office. I really need to get my head down at work though - being back is a novelty, and not condusive to getting a lot done at the moment.
Anyway. It’s late. I should be thinking about going to bed or something. Maybe a cup of tea…