Being the family "computer guy", I somehow got assigned the task of getting the family web site going. No, not just my little family, but the whole extended family.

Well, I just signed up for a real ISP, which gives me some 100MB of web space. Enough for whatever crap my family wants to upload. Problem is that all the pre-done web-site stuff like PHP-Nuke requires an SQL database. Something that costs $5 more a month. Sorry, I don't want to pay this.

Anyone know of something like PHP-Nuke that doesn't use an SQL db? I'd like to find something that uses files only.

So, my boss is out of town today, so I thought I would start writing in this silly /. journal.

I've been trying to work with gnu make to get it to do more than just compile code and link it in the right order. I've been trying to use it to update the genetics data that I work with. So I'm trying to do some things that I don't think that make was designed to do. Like creating implicit rules that can use more than a single pattern.

See, you can write an implicit rule like this to make a .out from a .in file:

%.out : %.in
                  do something...

But alas, if you want to do anything a little more complicated, like use a regular expression for the pattern match, then you're out of luck. Sorry.

I've been toying with some ideas for updating make while keeping backwards compatibility. Since I don't think that using more than one % is allowed in the target, then I'm thinking one could use two or more %s for delimiting a regular expression.

Like this:

bn%_Q(\w+)_DB(\w+)%.txt : $(rem1).nt $(rem2).db
              do some stuff...

So that $(rem1) would be the first match in the R.E. and $(rem2) would be the second.

Who knows.