As you can tell if you read the title of this post aloud, this post comes in three parts, and they all rhyme.

I started today by hooking up an ancient Pentium 75 with 16 MB RAM with FreeBSD 4.8 (latest version that will run on that hardware). It worked, up until the point at which I wanted to put Apache on it, and I couldn't mount the CD-R I had burnt with the sources on. So that stopped there.

I then did some Visual Basic.NET programming, with Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition. I started to create a little Text Editor application for Windows. I got fairly far, then VB crashed and I hadn't saved. Grrr. So I have got just beyond that point now, and I will continue another day.

Now I am downloading the official trial version of Windows Server 2003 R2 from Microsoft. If I can find a suitable box to run it on, I hope to see how it compares to Linux when it comes to doing server stuff. Over a 1MB connection, though, this could take some time.

Hello everyone, and before I start proper - Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all (if anyone does read this, that is). It's Christmas Eve, so don't expect a blog post tomorrow, people.

You may have noticed that in this post's title I have substituted the word 'Happy' for 'Hybrid', and there is a very good reason for this. I have relaunched my Hybrid Web Services site with an all-new look and the latest Project Krystal build, version 0.6a. There's a tiny bit of info on Project Krystal here, along with my RSS Generator (which is in its next version now, having cleared up a few minor issues).

Well, there's not much else dev-wise I've been doing, today I was pretty much just skinning Project Krystal to Hybrid's requirements and making it look integrated with the whole Hybrid look. Well, I did rediscover a gaming classic (and found a patch to make it run on Windows XP) - Worms 2. It rules. See you soon.

Well, it's certainly taken me a while - I'll grant you that, but at least now SUSE Linux 10 is back online. I've installed Apache 2.0.54 and a PHP 4 version included with SUSE 10, so I avoid compiling myself and once again causing the partition table problem. SUSE 10 works, it works well, and I even found an RPM for Firefox 1.5, so I'm fully upgraded and operational.

Windows, however, is plagued with a choppy sound, plus still the disappearing mouse trouble from my last post. I'm working on a solution with the guys at Linux-noob.com (thanks guys, you rock), but until then it looks like MS Office doesn't work.

Ah well, at least I can continue webdev finally (on Linux, naturally). I am adding a user logon auditing system to Project Krystal. Speaking of which, the build on the Buttons site is now v0.5.2.

Let's hope Windows starts working soon.

I had a bit of a major problem recently. Other people disagree (more), but I'm convinced that PHP 5.1.1 deleted my partition table for my first hard drive. I've explained it enough already, so use the link above if you want the story.

So this means that Windows and Linux need to be put back on, in fact I only just managed to save my source code, as I could boot into Windows once and once only. This is a job for the Christmas holidays; only three more days of school to go.

I'm running a temporary build of Windows at the moment, because it is unstable as anything. The mouse stops working periodically (and it's not the cable) and it boots up slower than a snail with a speed limiter.

I've done some serious sorting of security on PK recently. The logon security algorithm has been made a lot better, but for obvious reasons I'm not saying why, as the alpha version of PK is still online (somewhere) and it is a potentially hackable thing (it's been taken down by me now).

Also, user permissions have had an MD5 hashing system added as well to make sure people can't just meddle with their session data to gain access to modules they aren't allowed to access.

I've had an idea that I might do a Webdev & Nerd Stuff podcast at some point, if I get round to it, so I'll keep you updated with that and as ever with all my webdev projects.

Major news update :

Project Krystal has gone live on the all-new Buttons Productions website (my school's Young Enterprise company). It's been a long time coming having the system this stable (it's approaching Beta quality). I'm really happy because it looks great, works (better than the Alpha builds anyway) and just generally it has been quite an achievement to get to this stage. We're now on version 0.5.1 (approcaching Beta 1).

Whoo!

I'll keep you posted with GPL stuff and PK stuff too.