Screaming Penguin

I finally got around to upgrading the penguin server this weekend, it wasn't without pain, but it's done. I was running an ancient version of Fedora there, and have now installed the latest Ubuntu server (9.04). Everything is working again, I think. It's amazing how nice Ubuntu is to work with. From the days of compiling my own kernel and then customized Apache on Red Hat, to literally a few apt-get installs. With a few command lines Apache with PHP5 and MySQL/Postgres is running (and so other several other services). And I even like the way the packages are setup (in terms of Apache, sites-available/sites-enabled and a2enmod, conf locations, logging, etc). Now I know this isn't all attributable to Ubuntu/Debian, Apache is much more modularized now to make this possible, and other packages have also gotten more mature, but it's still remarkable how easy it is to do today compared to 5 years ago. That said, it still wasn't pain free. Enter Drupal. I appreciate the effort, but that codebase is a gigantic mess, and third party modules are often worse. I ended up upgrading at the same time as the move and had to manually manipulate several tables to get things working again. I am going to be looking at moving TotSP to AppEngine and using something like Bloog in the near future. Drupal is just too brittle. Besides, I want to learn more Python, and AppEngine, so moving things there should be a good learning experience. Anyway, we're back on the air, though we still don't have any decent recent content ;).