I had another day tweaking our office based Jaunty 9.04 development box this week and was reminded just how easy it is to set up an open source e-commerce platform these days, in under an hour we had OSCommerce running alongside a populated installation of ZenCart. With the rest of the day to kill (the buses aren’t that regular back from El Llano to Tamarindo) I stuck some CMS on there too for James to fiddle with, you can never have too many development platforms, especially on a 64 bit unit.

When I say that the buses aren’t too regular they actually are (regular) as it goes, regularly either one or two in an afternoon, with *afternoon* starting around 4pm and quite easily extending until  after 7pm. I had the pleasure of one such endurance session at the bus stop there the other night and although it was entertaining (up to a point) watching the assortment of battered locals on even more battered motocross bikes visit the garage to top up various cola/water/lemonade bottles with petrol (for what I can only imagine to be even more battered motocross bikes back home) I’d had enough after two hours and trudged back down into the mosquito rich darkness of the village to prey on James good nature for a lift home (Thanks mate).

Anyway, the server, WordPress and Joomla went in seamlessly (as they always do) however Drupal was a bit of a pain, for some reason it kept looping back to the installation stage after re-securing the php config files (which you have to do post install), anyway I worked it’s game out after several round trips, or should I say *my* game, I’d been forgetting to check ‘execute’ on the file permissions and was just leaving things as read only, the half wit that I am (we all have *those* days though I suppose)

All done though and it’s happily sat there as a fully loaded and updated 9.04 development box, php scripting is whipping along quite happily with sendmail (after I stuck some manual domain entries in the resolv.conf) and it’s now sending in seconds rather than minutes, I’ve even put curl on there for added sauce (source?).

As I’m going to live in Berlin for a while from July what I could really do with is some sort of firewall bypass ‘LogMeIn‘ style SSH CLI access across the internet, I *can* connect to James’ Vista box and putty across but it would be much cleaner if I could get straight on the Server itself, I’ve been mooching round Hamachi and may be getting closer, just not that apparently, more in optimism then resolution in fact. For info (and before you offer it as a solution) port forwarding isn’t possible or else I’d use VNC, no, not in Costa Rica, well not in our office anyway. The office web connection routers’ external IP is in the 10.XXX.XXX.XXX private address range, it’s insane, the whole area is part of one big private class A business network served by Cabletica from Liberia under a singe web facing IP, it’s unbelievable (and further explains why I had to manually tweak the resolv.conf, systems behind our office router don’t even pick up the “domain.name”).

If anyone’s got any ideas for quick, easy (and free) tunneled SSH (without a need for port forwarding) I’d be keen to hear them, up until then (and until the Web VS comes online) then it may have to be the long way round for a while (if and when of course), I can’t be spending much more time at that damned bus stop.

Monolingual is (I think) one of the most useful OSX utilities about, it simply frees up extra disk space at no cost (who isn’t glad of a bit few extra bytes). Don’t worry, it’s not a data compression program, it merely removes all the extra language files you don’t use/need, and you’d be surprised how they add up. Install it, fire it up and tick the boxes. I usually dump everything but English (obviously) and as I’m an Intel based Mac guy now all the old PPC (G4 & G5) architectures too.

For maximum effect run it AFTER you’ve got your system loaded up as each program contains their own individual multi-language options, I’ll wager you’ll be quite surprised at the results, seriously. My MacBook Air is one of the 1st generation units with an 80GB HD so space management is something I need to keep on top of, anyway, after installing my latest suite of apps I thought it best to have a clean out attaining my best ever results by freeing up over 4GB, quite a saving and most definitely worth doing leaving me with a nice slot of 20GB to play with.

Monolingual is a free download from HERE.