Thu Dec 20 23:10:49 PST 2001

With a little typing it sure is easy to create PHP driven content. Just as easy to make a pretty big mess as well. I’m going to have to sit down and make some plans so the thing doesn’t snowball on me into a huge mess. It’s very clear that PHP is similar to perl. It has the same software maintance issues and "dark side of the force" that perl does:

EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH–DAY

With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the
many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the
Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his
exercises–grepping, installing new packages, logging in as
root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts
in Python.

YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer’s strength flows from code maintainability.

But beware of Perl. Terse syntax… more than one way to do it…
default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they.
Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you
start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny,
consume you it will.

LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?

YODA: No… no… no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.

I’ve always loved that because it’s so true. Perl is easier and quicker to code, but it truly suffers from maintance problems. I’ve had to look at my perl code over years, and it always seems to suffer the readiblity problems. Recently I’ve been using Python at work, and it is indeed better for producing code that can be read by at least the same person later on. It’s also a lot better for writing big programs.

Anyway, I’ve also been hacking at DC linux again, and a couple of CDRs later I’m getting pretty close. I’ve got a working kernel booting with the distro code, but init isn’t running correctly. I think it’s because the GDROM isn’t getting mounted correctly and so all I have is what’s on the initrd ramdisk image. So after hacking up the ramdisk image, I might have it working. The downside is that I’m going through my spindle of CDRs a bit fast :-P

Well, I though I’ve figured out what the problem is. The kernel wasn’t being passed any arguments on what to run once it launched. I though for a while that it was a problem with incorrectly mounting the ramdisk or the gdrom or something like that. But it appears that the distro with the kernel that I can compile was somehow passing arguments to his kernel to tell it what to run or something. But my attempts to compile the kernel with particular options just isn’t working out at all.

If I can just get this thing up and running with PPP, then I won’t have to be constantly jumping through all these hoops to compile a kernel, build ramdisks and go though the fun of building a DC-bootable disk which is a bit of a pain, but I’m getting used to it. I’m going to need to buy a few more CDRs real soon now, I’m down to 4 or 5…