marj81's blog

Well I've done the groundwork to get the development environment going using eclipse and drupal. It was a bit of a struggle, but I think I have a handle on it now. I just happen to stumble upon an easier way to get another development environment up and running with much less headache and mess. The secret?? Xampp!! You go to that site and see a groovy chic having fun on the page! She's probably happy because xampp is soooo easy! Basically, you download the xampp package, install it, and start it. That's it! It's simple instructions for anybody from Linux to Windows.

Remember the problem I had here:

Search for the line beginning with APACHE_MODULES, which should look like:

APACHE_MODULES="actions access alias auth ... php4 php5 rewrite"

Well in the galaxy of Linux, planet Ubuntu, a way was found! Since Ubuntu is the spawn of Debian, we must adhere to the Debian way! As root, I had to add a rewrite module so apache could work properly.

Ok, I've been following the instructions given by IBM on the developerworks area in their site. They created those tutorials using Suse and they said that other distributions can work as well; one of them being Ubuntu. Well things seem to go well and I've experienced some slight differences, but I've run into a small problem with the Apache configuration. Their main config file on Suse is found in /etc/sysconfig/apache2 while Ubuntu doesn't have a sysconfig folder. When you download all of the software you need for apache2, it creates it's own apache2 folder so it's path is /etc/apache2. The main config file is apache2.config, but IBM tells you to do this:

[phpwiki]
For those of you who don't know, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005 that changes the start and end dates for Daylight Saving Time (DST) as of spring 2007. Linux distributions all over have been working on this because other countries have decided to change their daylight savings times as well! Well I've done a little bit of research to get everyone up to speed on this and I've compiled a list with websites to go to so you can update yourselves! I'm still researching so I will be updating this list periodically so check back! Side note: these sites I'm posting will lead you to where you officially need to go if what you need isn't already there!

Well after completing "The Unix Philosophy," I realized just how much power and freedom Unix gives the user! So much power that the user, myself included, doesn't even realize and, as a result, doesn't even see the full potential of it! Peter Parker's uncle, shouts out to Spiderman, said "that with great power comes great responsiblity." Can users be responsible? Can we handle something so small yet so great? Can we open ourselves up to even learn a small piece of it?? After reading this book on unix, I think that we can! Unix has been on the cutting edge since day one, but the world overlooked it because of it's simple complexity!

When first picking up this book, I thought "yeah I know a little about unix, but I know a little more about linux so why read this book?" Well, even though I've only gotten to the fourth chapter, I see that to go forward one must know the past and that's exactly what this book has started for me. For it to be so thin, there are loads and loads of knowlege packed inside and, best of all, a person can't possibly get lost in it! The technical jargon is kept to an absolute minimum and, yes, I've actually found some humor in it!

When Mike Gancarz talks about programmers constantly building massive programs, I saw myself in that statement already! My favorite concepts right now are small is beautiful and portability over efficiency.