Barkerburgh

Last night it suddenly occured to me that I have two working (apparently stable) OSs (Windows 2000 Pro and Debian’s Ubuntu Linux), powerful server side processing and a DBMS on W2K (php and MySQL, the same to be working soon on Ubuntu), three different browsers on W2K (Firefox, MSIE and Netscape 7), Firefox on Ubuntu, and pretty much all the proper manuals and documentation, in part thanks to Reid.

I experienced a feeling akin to wanting to be on a trip to Mars in a homemade spaceship. Glee.

What shall be my first project?

A little background. ‘Coronation Street’ used to be on weekday afternoons on CBC for years. Then they moved it to 7:30pm. Actually better for me. Then thanks to last year’s hockey playoffs and the Olympics, it disappeared for several months. I think that in the first nine months of 2005, we got maybe three months of Corrie. The Sunday morning back-to-back rerun of the previous week’s episodes was useful, when it was on, but it wasn’t during the Olympics. When Corrie finally came back, it was on at 7:00pm, which left my 7:30 timeslot open. What to watch?

Jeopardy.

Still with me? Wow.

So here’s the project. A web page produced on the fly by the server that will be a generalized browser version of this image, the Jeopardy starting board:

And one for Double Jeopardy, with the cash values per question doubled. Get it?

The category labels will only be “Category 1″ etc, though. I don’t need to know or input the questions for each category per episode, I will just need to click a radio button for Right or Wrong. This will be sent to the server, where the question’s dollar value, my answer etc will be stored in a table, and a sister table will tally my cumulative winnings, rightings and wrongings, by episode, date, time, etc.

I’m still designing the database in Java-based Freemind mind mapping software from sourceforge. What a great tool.

I figure it’s a little fancier than “Hello World”, which tradition I respect the hell out of, don’t get me wrong. But it won’t help me learn php and MySQL.

Two things, actually.

I’ve been trying to get my Ubuntu machine set up with Apache, php and MySQL so that I can try to learn them in their ‘native’ environment. So far no lucking fuck. (Oh, that didn’t work…)

I can install them all but I can’t fiddle the .conf files (or whatever) to get them to talk to each other. Apache works fine, but it’s just a basic webserver without bells and whistles if I can’t get the other two to cooperate. It’s not impossible; I just can’t figure out how to change the right lines in the .conf files. There’s no errors if I change the wrong ones, she just don’t work. As is proving to be typical, the examples are dense and obscure, the help doesn’t and doing it exactly doesn’t do anything.

What I have managed to do is to get the same trio working on my Windows 2000 machine. It didn’t at first, and I had the same problems as on Ubuntu. However, while searching for some comprehensive Apache/php/MySQL package for Ubuntu, I found a Windows based setup called WAMP that installs all three and basically configures them all for me. Again, that didn’t work the first time I tried it, but I cleaned up the registry, tried again and again and again and last night, I got my php test script (which basically just calls “‘phpinfo()”) to work.

There are also php and MySQL admin pages which worked fine, including allowing me to create a test database in MySQL.

So then, I installed a php/MySQL dependent wiki program from Sourceforge that I’ve been hoping to get going for a while and, after some more fiddling, that worked too.

TV, last night, was a bust, however because it was an embarrassment of riches with new episodes of good shows in the same time slots, all evening. Very difficult night for me in that regard, ameliorated to some degree by my success with the web server suite.

I will survive.

One thing I have learned about Ubuntu, besides ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’, is that, like Microsoft, when the documentation gives a specific example, and you follow it exactly, exactly, exactly, double and triple-checking your spelling and spacing and case, it doesn’t work.

Then you change something essentially arbitrarily, and it works.

Plus c’est la meme chose.

But the jury (and by jury, I mean Me) is still out.

Discovered alien. Couldn’t run it as me, because I’m not root. Couldn’t log in as root, neither from any app/point/terminal locally nor via ssh from my W2K machine.

Discovered ssh. Couldn’t telnet. Couldn’t ssh from W2k until I installed it from the Ubuntu gui.

Discovered nano. Why would anybody use vi? Or even vim? Taliban geeks, that’s who.

Disovered sudo and gksudo. Thank you, geek gods! Why can’t I log in as root from the initial log in gui?

Discovered chmod, chown, a couple of others. Couldn’t modify config files because I’m not root. Couldn’t log in as root

Discovered the Root Terminal. Finally! I nearly cried, I swear to Christ.

Discovered info.

Disovered .conf files.

Discovered I actually like digging around in the man files and about 20 different Linux pdfs and chms.

Discovered alien Apache works and alien PHP will install, but they ain’t talking yet.

Knowledge is Power!

(I feel like the kid in the SciFi story who finds the ancient computer left over by a lost civilization and he has to learn how to use it to save his people, but there’s a deadline looming and he’s really only a peasant farmer. Story ends badly.)