"Not Dead Yet" was uttered at about 85 MPH on a desolate stretch of country road, some 15 years ago, by my pal Andrew with a huge grin on his face. He and I had gone, one fine early spring day, to get my '73 Javelin/AMX (don't worry that you don't know what that is, not many do) out of storage. It was, even then, starting to show its age, and I hadn't had the time to really get it back into shape. So, after checking the fluid levels, tires, belts, hoses and other bits, we set out to "blow the carbon out of her." That's car-geek code for flooring it until you're just plain scared of how fast you're going.
One moment, we're pulling out onto the road, slowly, carefully, motor shaking slightly, grumbling moderately. The next, we're burning gas, and roadway, at an alarming pace (this was when gas was cheap, mind you), the hissing sound of the V8 swallowing huge volumes of relatively cold air into the cowl-induction system and the outright angry roar of the exhaust pure music to our ears. Yes, it was showing its age, but my Jav wasn't dead yet.
Some while back in this blog, I noted that just because my company, Turtol, had gone defunct, our product the TurtolCMS, wouldn't. This is because it is Open Source Software, and as such can survive the death of the parent company, provided there is sufficient energy, somewhere, to keep it going. I'm pretty attached to the TurtolCMS, but because I've been making other plans and pursuing other opportunities (yes, yes, eventually, I'll let you in, when things are more stable), I haven't been able to put the energy in.
Recently, that changed. One of my "other opportunities" will be based on the TurtolCMS. To further that, I, along with Roberto (late of Turtol, also), have been working on the next version. We made some significant advances, but most of the work has been focused on taking a slightly worn-out engine and rebuilding it so that it will be even better in the future. We'll do some benchmarking in the very near term, hoping to see quite a lot of performance improvement. We have some plans in place which we expect to provide even larger gains in performance, features and usability. But it's Not Dead Yet.
Look for the release of TurtolCMS v0.6 in a week or so in all the usual places.
