It turns out that DreamHost does not allow system() calls to be executed from PHP. This nugget of knowledge essentially throws a gigantic monkey wrench into my plans for the photo album software I'm writing. I was planning on allowing the large thumbnail creation process to run in the background, while the user continued to do whatever else they wanted. Since I can't spawn another process, these plans are shot. :-(

So here's what I plan to do for the time being: instead of using two thumbnails (100 x 100 and 640 x 480) and a base image (1024 x 768), I'm switching to one thumbnail (100 x 100) and a base image (800 x 600). It's not what I had planned, but it'll have to do for now. Thoughts? Suggestions? Sympathy?