It seems like every time I try to get around to actually writing some code, I discover yet another thing that I have to do in order to make that more possible. Today, it was: Get PHPUnit installed on Lórien, so I could run my unit tests locally during development, rather than having to shove everything back up to Finrod every time I wanted to run a single test.
The yak-shaving odyssey that this necessitated involved upgrading my local copy of PHP (which originally came with InstantRails) from 4.whatever to 5.2.8, so that I could develop PHP5 code at all, then installing PEAR so that I could use it to get PHPUnit, and also resolving the weird extension-loading bugs on PHP for Windows (for example, you have to load php_mbstring.dll before php_exif.dll, or else both of them will fail and complain. Ditto with php_pdo.dll and php_sqlite.dll. None of this is documented in the manual; you have to Google on it and get links to the bug database. Joy.)
But I can now run PHPUnit test on the stuff that I’m working on, locally rather than remotely. So… now can I get some code written?