In the 'You learn something new every day' department.

Okay, one of the more constant tasks of a system administrator is making programs available to his/her (l)users. Usually this means grabbing the source code and compiling it for said user. Most unix source packages come with an autogenerated script called 'configure' which sets things up so the product will build on your particular flavor of unix.

Configure outputs a buncha crap. A makefile that you use to do the actual build, a logfile of the results of the configure run, a cache file with the results, for when you run it again, and a little file called 'config.status' the only use I ever got out of before yesterday was the tidbit at the top - what arguments you ran configure with.

So imagine my irritation with myself when after over six years working with programs like this on a regular basis I suddenly notice 'hey... this config.status file is a script... oh, shit, you're kidding. This thing will rerun configure for me with all my arguments?'

...

So, here's a toast to my powers of perception.

Always something more to learn

On the heels of noting that I learn something new every day, I gave myself a lesson in the fact that there's _always_ something new to learn. I spent the evening staring at someone else's code - the code to the content management service Mambo, which I'm contemplating using for my website. Currently my surfnetca.com site uses a severely castrated PHP-Nuke backend which I never really completed, mainly because PHPNuke is a bitch to code for and a worse pain to look at. I don't like ugly interfaces. Mambo's pretty, but that doesn't mean it's easier to comprehend. It looks like they designed a nice little module-injection system which makes it easy to incorporate finished product, but I've got to figure out how the hell the program hooks into what I write in the first place. Not so easy. Staring at PHP code all night I've gotten eyestrain and a certain respect for the writers. The interfaces are beautiful and easy to use. As soon as I figure out how the system hooks into my code, I'll be good to go and willing to work with the product.

I need to write something usable for my webcomics setup. When I wrote the stuff for my previous website, I made a mistake - went to using a database as the back end (my original version was a flatfile), but got bored/distracted/disgusted and never wrote an administration interface. Gonna go the other way 'round this time and write the admin interface first. Hopefully that'll spur me into writing the important front-end bit.

My work-in-progress rests at www.dreamlibrarian.com. About the only things I've got there are some miscellaneous links and the random-quotes bar. We'll see what I actually do with it.