The other day upon the stair
I met a man that wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
Gee, I wish he’d go away!

Just seen the new film from David Fincher Zodiac, and considering the very long running time of over 2 1/2 hours it was very engrossing and the time did not drag at all.

Dispite the fact that this is a David Fincher film, who is one of my favourite Directors, this did not really have anything to do with me seeing it. I thing the thing that sparked my interest was that it covers the murders that very loosely inspired Dirty Harry.

Despite the subject matter being serial killing , after the first 20 minutes of so of the film there is little gore.

All in all its a very gripping film

As a developer in both ASP.NET and PHP I’ve spent the last few days trying to install PHP onto IIS.

Today, i declared this task a waste of time. Why? I’m not sure myself really. I would seem that somewhere during the installation of IIS or XP, a certain DLL that PHP requires to load is missing. Trying to track down what exactly is wrong has been a hell of a chore. There is plenty of help out there, but with the combinations of versions of OS, IIS and PHP trying to get a definitive answer seems to be taking a very long time.

So after 2 days of frustration i tried something which at first seems stupid but in fact works quite nicely for my problem. The solution to my problem is to install both Apache and IIS.

I new they both wouldn’t work at the same time, but the question was could they both co-exist without interfering with each other.
The answer seems to be a resounding yes.

Installing XAMP and IIS isn’t a problem, both install quite easily , and to switch between the 2 is just a simple matter of stopping and starting the require server.

In fact this is the solution I really wanted. A nice clean IIS environment to program asp and ASP.NET, and a nice clean Apache environment to program PHP.

Next job is to install SQLSERVER, this should give me complete flexibility when it comes to being able to code for any type of customer.

Once i get a new machine and a wifi card that can be configure with Linux i do intend to set up a Linux server, until then this is the best solution.

UPDATE
After a few days running my server like this i found that even though this set-up is fine for serving web pages, it appears to have some problem with Visual Studio checking out pages.
This being the case, and the install of IIS and Xamp are pretty standard and fast, I’ve decided to remove and install the servers as required.

Since I setting up my server, i was a little cramped for desk space with the extra monitor keyboard and mouse.

My usual solution to this would have been to install VNC and control the server remotely. This is okay to some extent but the screen often lags, and the LCD monitor didn’t take up that much space so I’ve decided to try Synergy, a nice little program that was mentioned on geekBrief.

Synergy is total free , easy to install and cross platform . Once installed the new machine acts a little to a second monitor, just moved you mouse of screen and it will appear on the other machine> The mouse is used to control the target of the keyboard too, ie, if the mouse is active on screen A the keystrokes go to machine A, on screen B the keystrokes go to machine B. Another nice feature is the cross screen clipboard, which gives you the ability to cut from one machine and paste on the other.

The only slight hiccup i had was when it came to shutting down. It would seem that Synergy shuts down first so, if you a prompted to save changes you have a little problem. For this reason I’m leaving a little mouse plugged in just in case of problems.

All in all a very nice little utility.

Its been a while since i was a techie, yesterday was the first time in quite a while that I’d set-up a machine from scratch.

Things have changed a little since my day, everything’s got smaller and hotter. Who knew that running the machine with its lid of would cause it to overheat, something to do with the airflow being pulled over the components for better cooling. I had a little problem with overheating but nothing permanent, though i must play with the fans a little, as it sounds like a jet, there must be a happy medium.

So anyway, I reinstalled the machine from scratch, new hard drive, new installation, best to do things right. I must say installation of XP Pro iwent with no problems. THe things that surprised me was the number of critaical updates that had to be done, 77 in total, and thats since the release of service pack 2.

Oh well alls well now, on to setting it up as my web and data server.