Geek-out alert! No videos today.. If you're allergic to technical details, head elsewhere :)

I've been meaning to give a shot to coding some small ideas at home.. Really simple stuff, like groceries lists and crap like that.. I hit some challenges/limitations:

• We already have 2 PCs. Especially with the recent high temperatures, I am NOT adding a third machine in here. Don't want the BTUs, and most likely won't be able to spare the amps on the home circuit after I finally get around to installing the AC..
• Both are running XP. I wouldn't switch Sweetie's to Linux.. There's no advantage to her as a user, learning new apps for not much gain, swearing at IE-only sites, not being able to try the latest xp-only doo-hikey that comes along.. Mine is my gaming machine, so it's XP-bound.
• I started looking at web frameworks for perl, since I like perl. Most of them won't (easily) run on XP. I'm not quite trusting Apache on Windows either, even for a home app. So I guess a need a LAMP stack, emphasis on the L.
• I don't have that much I/O and RAM to spare so emulating a whole other machine via VMWare to run Linux isn't really a good solution. Wouldn't want to install Server on my PC, *maybe* Workstation 6 would work, think I read somewhere it should be able to run VMs as a service..

So it looked like I was going to either have to get a host somewhere and do my stuff remotely, or look at Windows-centric approaches.. PHP or Ruby could have worked, but that would have meant learning a new language (I'm not opposed to that, but if I can go with something I already know..) and for no good reason I'm still just very curious to give Catalyst or Maypole a try..

Then I remembered Cygwin.

It basically is a Linux layer for Windows.. You get a shell and most tools you're used to while working on a Unix box.. I hadn't looked at it in a while, and I'm impressed by the latest version of the setup -- there's tons of packages ready to be installed with a simple click. A whole bunch of tools, apps, even X11 (I did manage to make it work back in 2001 after a LOT of manual compilations and headache :P) are prepared and ready. Suh-weet. Google tells me it should be possible now to get Catalyst in there successfully.. I added Ruby for good measure so it's ready to play with too.. Next step is evaluating if I want/need Apache 1.x or 2.x.. Probably going to play with subversion too, especially since right now we have cvs at work.. see if there's major differences and such..

So this should be interesting to play with.. and give me a bunch of reasons to blog :)