a late night work ramble...

I have been developing a set of installers for quite a large amount of data for the past year now. All of the releases have been stable for some time now, but there's always going to be that extra feature, or the data itself gets updated from our vendor... Anyways, through testing I've found that the installers themselves compile faster and with fewer complications after I configured a virtual machine (vmware) for NSIS development.

I have two vm's on a single machine: one I use for development and the other for testing purposes. Between the two of them I have run through an entire 500gb drive and am no longer able to shutdown the vm's and back them up so I can throw an archive backup on our file server. So I've got a 1TB drive coming in from Newegg that I'll be installing early next week to remedy this. In the meantime I've kept all of the NSIS code itself version controled in a series of SVN repositories.

I'll have to update the C# data deployment application (just a windows form app that is kicked off in NSIS as part of the installer). I've got two versions of this data deployment application: one for the installer (cleanmapcopy runs off of registry settings) and another (mapcopy offers a full gui for our technical support to use for installation troubleshooting).

We are fully 64bit OS compliant now, so the next thing to do is to figure out the difference in the way I'm successfully installing fonts in Windows XP and what has changed as far as installing fonts in Vista and Server 2008.

I'm starting to lose interest in scripting languages. It's probably just because I've been working in NSIS and PHP for I don't know how long. I just miss the feel of a full C# or Java or C++ to work with. (something general purpose that I can do whatever I set out to do in) Freedom if you will... I think Zack and I both are kind of spent on Web programming at the moment. I don't mind it as much as he does probably, but it just seems like there's so much bloat out on the web of redundant features for "this" SaaS app that are also found in "that" one too.... Kinda feels like this type of programming has lost that zeal of personal application or useful touch I once saw in it.

Ok well its time to get some rest. Going to test out this http://sleep.fm/ alarm clock I setup.