My latest personal project has been trying to get my Gentoo Powerbook to take screenshots of a submitted URL in many browsers. My laptop is a working server with Apache/PHP/Perl and here's how it works: I use a PHP form to submit a url to my server, the server loads the URL in lots of browsers, using WINE if necessary. While the browser is open, Scrot snaps a screen shot and saves it to a publicly-viewable directory. I've run into two problems: first, apache creates child processes for every function call made in PHP. When the function is done running, Apache terminates the child process. This means that the browsers open to the URL for maybe 1/10th of a second, close immediately, and then Scrot takes a screen shot. The problem is that I'm going to have to call a Perl script and have Perl break off and create a new process for the browsers. I'm in the process of learning how the perl daemon stuff works.

Second, I'm considering just telling Xorg to use multiple screens instead of my actual display screen. As I understand it I can have my display tied to Screen0, but still render browsers and such in other screens (Screen1, Screen2, etc), and then I can direct Scrot to take screenshots of those screens.

Professionally, I'm trying to get Flash to properly display HTML that is being read from an XML file generated by a PHP CMS for a client. It sucks and is annoying. I'm not on the Flash/AS/Flex bandwagon yet, so I have to plow through it all and cludge stuff together to get it to work. Gah.

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