The weekend approacheth!

So, somehow I got roped into a paintball game on Saturday. Never done it before, but it should be fun anyway. There’s going to be over a dozen of us on a few acres at a reserved paintball area, but I don’t really know much else. Hah.

Last weekend, I got a basic API written for the World Domination site. I was thinking of writing it in C or Ada, but I settled on PHP for now for a rapid development cycle. I may rewrite it in C later, so I can compile it directly as an Apache module and circumvent PHP altogether. PHP may be faster than it was, but it represents a 10x performance penalty when compared to static page serving… and that’s just gross. I might even find a way to integrate it with TUX, since it serves pages even three times faster than Apache. Now that’s scary; if I redid the API later, I could see a 30x speed boost in my application just from that. Of course I’ll figure in caching, but if a bunch of pages get generated at once, that could be bad too - so I want that part to be as efficient as possible. Besides, with a BBS style, very few things can cache fully, so I’ll need page generation to leave scorch marks.

I installed Debian on my 2U server, and I have to say, as frustrating as that process was, I’m left with a very small but fully functional development and server platform. It’s about 400MB not counting documentation. I’m not really familiar with Exim, the default SMTP server they use, but it can’t be any worse than Sendmail. I’ll have to go about configuring it to really see. I’ve compiled the 2.4.21 kernel on it simply because the changelog for that kernel is frighteningly long, and a great majority of that is bug fixes. Now that I have that all done, I just need to get the cvs part configured, and I can start coding the WDS engine; possibly this weekend after the paintball game.

And yes, my unhealthy obsession with Dance Dance Revolution continues; I played for two hours today. I really can’t help it. I’ve been in training mode and playing heavy-mode songs on a speed setting of 2 or 3 to carefully watch some of those crazy arrow combinations. All I can say for now is that 16th notes are The Devil. I’m almost at the point where every song that doesn’t use them is a piece of cake. Unfortunately songs of 7 feet or more tend to use them liberally. I still have trouble with crazy shit like Paranoia and Max 300, but those hardly count as average songs. I still don’t see the day when I can do Max 300. That damn thing is so fast, even on a speed setting of 1, I still fail. I’ll just keep working on my stamina, and once I can consistently get a B on Paranoia Dirty Mix, I’ll go back to Max 300.

I think that’s it for now. Laaaaater.