Phil Dreizen

Hi Everyone. I'm starting this website (and this server) from scratch after having letting it go stale. The server is now running Debian Wheezy.

Some technical details follow: I'm trying something that is, arguably, insane. I'm writing the blog portion of this site in php, from scratch, backing it with a dbm database. The keys are the time of the post, and the entry itself is a JSON string representing the post. Arguably NoSQL inspired -- not that I know much of anything about NoSQL. In any case, something about the arrangement seems "simple" to me. Also, it lends itself to CLI tools to manage the posts. Also, I must be some kind of masochist.

So, when deciding on what kind of dbm to use, I made a "fun" discovery: Wheezy packages php5 with qdbm support and no gdbm support. But packages python with gdbm support and no qdbm support. And there doesn't seem to be any way to rectify the sitution using the repositories. This is quite annoying if I had wanted to use python and php to interact with the same underlying db, which I was considering doing. On the bright side, it stopped me from doing that.