It’s not just an experiment in software engineering, I promise. I’ve done the last of what I needed to do now – finished up unit test integration with a couple of extensions to UnitTest++, re-wrote the build script to allow debug and release builds to be called in the same ant invocation (which has unfortunately shown me just how ugly XML can get when used for conditional logic…), and a load of other minor tweaks and fiddles to get things running as smooth or smoother than they were before in terms of day-to-day development.
I also spent a good long while upgrading this website’s WordPress installation and playing around with the wp-cache plugin, as I’ve noticed it takes a stupidly long time to load most of the time. This broke everything though so I’ve now uninstalled it. Perhaps I’ll just change hosts once my two year stint with StreamlineNet is up. It took a fair while to do all this since at the same time I was trying to get a local mirror of the site set up on my file server, to allow me to cock around with a local copy and upload changes once I’m happy with them. Again this didn’t work out too well, but since it’s not so important I was clever and gave up.
So, now I’m all set to make some tangible progress with CITS. Trac is telling me people are important. It probably knows best. Then again, it’s telling me I’m 55% done so perhaps it doesn’t.
I still use Streamline.net and frankly, the service has sucked.
I agree. Their service has really gone downhill in the last year or so. However, I think it’s partly WordPress too. It is very resource hungry for what it does. It’s even slow on my local server. Someone ought to right a lightweight alternative
Hey Ben
I came across this post (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001105.html) on a blog I read and it reminded me of your comments on WordPress/Streamline. It’s not just Streamline that’s suffering the problems; check out the CPU usage graph!!! The line “20 queries to load a page that hasn’t even changed” made me giggle.
Hope you’re well and enjoying your job. It sounds like you’re making some good progress with CITS!
Alastair
Interestingly, Streamline’s servers failing on trying to run PHP scripts with MySQL access once in every twenty attempts or so seems to have just cleared up – they may have actually finally fixed it after about A FUCKING YEAR of me repeatedly issuing support tickets.
Sorry to double post, but I notice a mention of FastCGI in that link – whenever Streamline’s servers threw up a 500 (Internal Server Error) which has been happening a lot lately, the logs mentioned FastCGI. Coincidence, or something more sinister?