1)I'm sick again. It's a weird illness - my ears are "blocked", even though I don't really have a runny nose. And I also can't taste food at all, or rather, smell it. I hope everyone knows that most of what we call "taste" is actually created by smell, because the tongue itself only distinguishes a few gradations - sweet, salty, sour, and bitter.
Not being able to taste food is terrible. Life immediately loses another quarter of its appeal. On the bright side - I hardly have any appetite, except maybe out of habit and just so that there's at least something in my stomach.
Good thing I can at least hear music.
2)I spent a whole lot of time studying Drupal CMS modules and upgrading https://web.archive.org/web/20060415181401/https://radio.super.lv to the fifth version of Drupal. To do this, I even finally spun up WAMPServer (a ready-made MySQL+Apache+PHP stack for Windows) on my local machine and the VS.PHP plugin for Visual Studio. The plugin rocks - it has syntax highlighting and debugging, and everything works right out of the box.
What can I say about Drupal: in a way, Knuth was right in a recent interview. Modularity nowadays has such complexity and lack of flexibility that instead of reuse, it's easier to write it yourself. I mean, reusing libraries and components is relatively easy, but site modules - hardly. Especially non-commercial ones, where there are no guarantees of a new version being released and functionality being expanded.
I would gladly rewrite everything in ASP.NET instead of Drupal's PHP, but there's a problem with hosting - lots of space and bandwidth for little money are only provided by Linux hosts, and they often require that the site be hosted with them too. Usually, for needs like mine, people use CDNs - special content delivery networks, but their prices are prohibitive for a non-commercial project, around 10-50 cents per gigabyte.
Now, there is a curious and extremely cheap CDN - https://www.simplecdn.com/. Its idea is that you pay not for bandwidth, but for hosting the file, and the prices are low - a 1-megabyte file will cost just one dollar. And then that file can be downloaded even a million times.
I would pay for something like that, but I can't afford even this - for the Radio Archive it would come out to 50 bucks a week, not to mention the existing files, which would cost about ten grand. Plus, it's scary to trust a recently created company with such a risky business model.
Later I'll write about nginx, threading, and event-based i/o.