How did I spent (wasted) my evening!

After working as part of sales team I have become more result oriented. I weigh every second in terms of how much I have progressed towards the final result. Sometimes I think that I have become more greedy and impatient. But I am not worried about that right now.

So what did I achieve today evening. Nothing yet. I started working on my website today morning at 10 AM planning to customize snoopy (http://snoopy.sourceforge.net) as per my needs.

I got stuck by 4 am when I thought I need to research on the debugging mechanisms available for PhP.  I found that xdebug has been marketed as the swiss knife for PhP developers. I got the tarred installer , ran it and damn.  I was missing phpize which comes as a part of PhP development environment.

ok I figured I need to get latest PhP (5.x) and build it to get phpize. No problem. code downloaded, extract...wow the PhP make script reports that there was no support for --enable-modules=so and apxs in my apache server.

So now I got to upgrade my apache server. done.

Next error from PhP installer: It needs libxml2 ver 2.6.11 or higher.

I got the required rpm, but then it needed higher version of libc ... I immediately realized that I am on a wrong track. Updating my OS to Fedora 9 would have been easier than updating libc and its dependencies.

Finally I downloaded the src of libxml2 and just built it successfully. It has taken me 5 hours to get to here. Oh, I still have to first upgrade my PhP, get phpize and install xdebug and then start debugging my 20 line PhP file.

I think thats one of the positives of Windows over Linux. For Windows you get one tool: VisualStudio and you dont need to worry about anything. Though it was a nightmare last year building a WinCE app but i think I was very new to WinCE and Microsoft puzzled me a lot with changing terminologies.

For Linux, you got to love your search engine.

Finally i got xdebug working!

phew!

Let start debugging....arrr sorry ...start learning xdebug!