Last Day at BankOne
Well... today is my last official day at BankOne and I have very mixed emotions. The package is nice, but I can't help wonder what would have happened if... Oh well... nothing I can do about that now.
I realized that I didn't have a consistent verison of PHP 4 on all three servers - sparky, barney and opus. Much to my surprise, sparky was the furthest from current running 4.0.3pl1. So I took the time to get opus to 4.0.4pl1 as well as building 4.0.4pl1 for sparky. I really like PHP and now that all the machines are at the current release we're in a good position to use either of the XML-RPC PHP clients. Nothing major, but since I had the time it seemed like a good thing to get caught up on.
I talked to Joel today - freshly back from vacation in the Florida Keys, and he suggested I get the CIA codebase up to the ISP and build it without PNG or FFTW support - as they have still not installed those components on the server. So I built a tar file and shipped it up with scp - gotta love those OpenSSH tools. Anyway, I get the code up and then go about modifying it for the above limitations. Not too bad, I think to myself.
Then I try to make it and get a ton of errors. Holy Cow! This server doesn't have the GTK includes installed on it! So I check and sure enough, the RPM gtk+-devel-1.2.8-7 is missing. So I send off a message to Joel to relay to them asking for this to be installed as well. I understand the desire to install 'less' rather than 'more' on servers where you're selling the free space, but the time they've lost in putting these on after the fact is more then offsetting the up-front lost revenue. Penny-wise, Pound-foolish.
When they get the GTK includes installed I'll be able to build CIA - with the limitations. If they get libpng installed, I can finish building Ploticus, and remove that limitation. Hmmm... service really is everything, isn't it?
UPDATE: - these guys at the ISP are amazing... I've been waiting to see when they get the GTK development package installed and have noticed that they only installed two of the four packages for VIM. Now it's true that they saved several MB of storage, but at what cost? Now gvim isn't there, nor is vim. The syntax highlighting is not there, but they have a form of VI... It's amazing.
They have a web-based technology look-up that does some kind of query to see what's installed on their machines, and it says gtk+-devel-1.2.8-7 was installed today, but the files aren't there, nor is the package listed in the RPM database for the machine I'm logged into. So they have a disconnect somewhere, and we're suffering for it. Oh well... what do you expect from a company that's doing this on the side... We might not have gotten a lot better service from a serious hosting site, but I have to wonder why it is that they are up and happy - with satisfied customers, and we're here fighting about what packages are installed. Holy Cow.