I don’t even par­tic­u­larly blame it, but it’s not work­ing on whis­per (faith­fully serv­ing in a cup­board since early-2005) any­more. It was run­ning 5.10 (I think) for yonks and then today I decided it might be easier/cleaner to pull the plug and re-install than just change the apt sources for a third time (or how­ever many it’s been)

So I down­loaded 6.10 (hence the tor­rent post) and it didn’t work.

Fine. I down­loaded 6.06 LTS (the, you know, meant-to-be-überstable-and-longlasting release) and it hangs load­ing the ker­nel. No ker­nel panic mes­sage, it just gets stuck.

This is annoying.

I’m basi­cally going to rebuild this entire server for Django’s sake, because it’s so use­ful for non-programmers like me to build things that work. This has been an inter­est­ing week at church because a whole bunch of new things started/old things restarted and finally I’m in a posi­tion to eval­u­ate where we can use tech­nol­ogy from an “insider” stand­point with regards to what I’m being paid to do at Youth­works.

I’ve got two small­ish (with poten­tial for mas­sive exten­sion) apps that I want to build in under two days for ongo­ing inter­nal use (one for TACKLES, another for my Switch small group this year) which will essen­tially form pro­to­types for revision/replacement as appro­pri­ate for use in a CYIADA global con­text once we get a pro­gram­mer on board (God will­ing some­time soon! I’m meet­ing with some­one who will hope­fully be help­ful in this regard on Fri­day, please be pray­ing!) and make some more con­crete deci­sions about archi­tec­ture. I can draw flow­charts until there’s noth­ing left to flow but that doesn’t get busi­ness logic written!

I’m think­ing the Ubuntu issue will be some stu­pid hard­ware thing that will go away once I take the com­puter apart. It prob­a­bly needs a bit of a clean, any­way. I just so don’t have time to spend on sysad­miny type stuff these days, only no-one else at work will/is inter­ested in doing it, which is rather annoy­ing — there’s free host­ing, but it’s seri­ously the most vanilla host­ing envi­ron­ment you’re likely to find any­where. It’s a CPanel/WHM gig with zero redun­dancy, zero back­ups, PHP4 only, and blah blah blah no-one cares. Generic with a cap­i­tal G set in Times New Roman. There is, of course, lit­tle inter­est in any­thing using a non-.Net plat­form. I’d actu­ally quite hap­pily use MSSQL, but ASP.Net is, by all reports, just gross from a web stan­dards per­spec­tive. And whilst I’m slowly being de-radicalised in that regard (par­tially because I am car­ing less about stan­dards and more about acces­si­bil­ity, which is bad long term any­way, and also because my view­points are becom­ing less rad­i­cal as main­stream moves towards where I am now! CSS is the norm, and pure content/presentation sep­a­rated sites are prob­a­bly rep­re­sent­ing 50% of site refreshes at the minute), I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel that much just yet.

Nor should I be.

*soap­box off*