My Apprenticeship - Tuesday, July 13, 2004

This summer I'm revisiting my short apprenticeship at Object Mentor. I'll be posting commentary on all my posts from the summer of 2004 exactly 5 years later to the day.

Tuesday 7-13-04

What was supposed to take a half hour yesterday actually did take 30 minutes today (after we got yesterday sorted out). Email problems turned out to be mostly a matter of restarting Outlook a few times. With the SMCCSharp compiler taken care of, I could go back to my other project: getting Word Press, MySQL, and PHP running on the Linux box.

Although Micah and I had downloaded, installed, and successfully used Mozilla (a web browser -- like Internet Explorer) I couldn't find it today. Paul came over and he couldn't find it. And he's been using Linux for years! It was somewhere on the hard drive, but after wasting about an hour looking for it I decided to stop throwing good time after bad and just re-install Linux (for a third time) and this time make sure I installed almost everything. While that was chugging away, I used my laptop to look up Word Press, MySQL, and PHP. Word Press claims you can set it up in five minutes. The hidden assumption is that you know how to use MySQL and PHP. Here's what I knew about MySQL as of this morning: It's a database. Here's what I know about PHP: it's a scripting language. I did, despite my ignorance, manage to get an local Apache server up and running using MySQL and PHP. I even got to look at some sample databases using the local host (what all this means is that I set up the computer to be a server and then I had another part of that same computer start talking to that server using Mozilla -- kinda weird but real useful when you want to get all the bugs out prior to opening your server up to the world wide web). After digging around on the internet for awhile I still wasn't sure how to get a basic database up and running. I'm pretty hopeful about tomorrow because David found a book in the OM library entitled 'MySQL and PHP for Web Development. Which sounds more than a little helpful.

Somewhere in the middle of the day, Paul said that he thought our SMCCSharp compiler might have some bad dependencies. Hmm.

I remember, during one of my first days at Object Mentor, being flabbergasted that David had a server running on his laptop. Weren't servers huge things that hosted cnn.com? How could he possibly have one on that little laptop? I'm pretty sure I kinda didn't believe him when he mentioned it in passing. Now here I was a few weeks later setting up a server my own self. Crazy talk.

4 days since distant-past-jake started the 5 minute WordPress install -- how long will it take? Stay tuned.

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