One of the reasons that I wanted to start this up again is so I had a little development diary and could also mention a few things that don’t belong elsewhere on RPoL.  “Bitching a moaning” probably dominates previous posts.  (c;

Back in.. uh… 2000 to 2004? …  Back when I was working at the datacentre where RPoL was also hosted, I found it fantastically quick to do coding.  Whatever I wrote could almost instantly be uploaded to the beta site for testing.  The server was physically about 5 metres from me.

Since both myself and RPoL have left that place I’ve tried to setup similar test beds, but nothing has stuck.  Finally I recently installed Sun’s VirtualBox on my desktop machine, installed (err, grabbed a ready image of) CentOS 5.1 (which the RPoL server runs), installed all the various applications that RPoL uses, and gently applied a hammer to get Berkeley DB to work.  I then grabbed a copy of RPoL’s data and voila, I have my own local copy of RPoL Alpha running on my machine.  Then with the help of WinSCP doing a “Keep remote directory up to date”, anything I edit here is uploaded to the alpha site within a second.  No longer am I forced to wait for 10 or whatever seconds to upload to the dedicated server in America before I can test if a tiny change worked.

I’ve found it amazingly helpful, and really great for speeding through code changes.

It will also let me test code a lot more before I upload it to beta, which used to suffer from very alpha and unfinished code as it was where I uploaded every code change, whether it worked or not.  Beta will get updated at pretty much the same pace, it just won’t get all the intermediate test script uploads that I do that leave the site in a sad state of disarray.

The new private groups are looking good, by the way.