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Toads of the Short Forest
Mar. 24th, 2005 10:35 pmI installed AMP on my home computer this week. That's LAMP minus the Linux, i.e. Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It wasn't that hard at all, really. I had a tutorial on the Web which made the Apache and PHP parts easy. I thought that MySQL would be easy, because it's the one I'd actually done before, but apparently they decided to throw a few wrenches in the works.
See, once I saw that version 4.1 was actually out of alpha, I wanted to install that one. Mainly because I got frustrated with the lack of subqueries in 4.0 when I was using it at work. But there were a few problems with 4.1, the first being that the recommended and supported client program doesn't work on Windows 98. I eventually just downloaded the obsolete, unsupported, and familiar MySQL Control Center instead.
After that, there was still a problem with the password authentication, which stalled me the first night. Later I Googled and discovered that 4.1 had changed the password format, so I had to use the OLD_PASSWORD function to generate old-style passwords. Et voilà!
Then the reason I wanted to install AMP in the first place--MediaWiki. I had decided, you see, that I wanted to have a Wiki on my computer.
You see, I have the "Wheel of Time" and "Song of Ice and Fire" concordances that I'm working on, and it struck me that I wanted the information in a better format than the Microsoft Word outline document that I have right now. I wanted cross-referencing, and auto-indexing. Instead of having a character list where I have to manual note down who appears in each chapter, I could just link to them from the chapter page and let the wiki software handle the "What links here". I've been working a lot in Wikipedia over the last few months--hence, MediaWiki.
It wasn't too hard to set that up either, once I fixed the password authentication again. It runs a mite slow, as might be expected on an ancient Celeron 433. I have to start up Apache and MySQL manually, since as far as I can tell Win 98 doesn't have actual services. I expect that this project will outlive this computer.
In my pipe dreams, I want this project's scope to grow. I've already been planning concordances for Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen", and maybe even the R. Scott Bakker "Prince of Nothing" series I just started. In the end, what I really want is a source where I(and, what the heck, everybody else, once I put it up on the Web)to be able to look up every single fictional character, place name, race, or the like from any fantasy series. Or science fiction, perhaps. Yes, I know, but I like to have projects to work on that I will never finish in my lifetime. It keeps me from getting too bored.
For starters, I've decided to go through the book I just finished, Tanith Lee's Mortal Suns, and try to do a quickie synopsis and character list, if not yet full-fledged pages for each one. I think it's due back at the library in a couple of days, so we'll see how far I get. I've already done some character lists from Mistress of The Empire and The Plains of Passage, and way back when I did them for a few other books, though without any annotation--just a list of names. Recently I was trying to gender-sort them, though, and that's hard when you don't remember the characters in question...
Anyway, if I don't surface much for the next little while, that's probably what I'm doing. Either that, or playing the CD version of Clue.
See, once I saw that version 4.1 was actually out of alpha, I wanted to install that one. Mainly because I got frustrated with the lack of subqueries in 4.0 when I was using it at work. But there were a few problems with 4.1, the first being that the recommended and supported client program doesn't work on Windows 98. I eventually just downloaded the obsolete, unsupported, and familiar MySQL Control Center instead.
After that, there was still a problem with the password authentication, which stalled me the first night. Later I Googled and discovered that 4.1 had changed the password format, so I had to use the OLD_PASSWORD function to generate old-style passwords. Et voilà!
Then the reason I wanted to install AMP in the first place--MediaWiki. I had decided, you see, that I wanted to have a Wiki on my computer.
You see, I have the "Wheel of Time" and "Song of Ice and Fire" concordances that I'm working on, and it struck me that I wanted the information in a better format than the Microsoft Word outline document that I have right now. I wanted cross-referencing, and auto-indexing. Instead of having a character list where I have to manual note down who appears in each chapter, I could just link to them from the chapter page and let the wiki software handle the "What links here". I've been working a lot in Wikipedia over the last few months--hence, MediaWiki.
It wasn't too hard to set that up either, once I fixed the password authentication again. It runs a mite slow, as might be expected on an ancient Celeron 433. I have to start up Apache and MySQL manually, since as far as I can tell Win 98 doesn't have actual services. I expect that this project will outlive this computer.
In my pipe dreams, I want this project's scope to grow. I've already been planning concordances for Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen", and maybe even the R. Scott Bakker "Prince of Nothing" series I just started. In the end, what I really want is a source where I(and, what the heck, everybody else, once I put it up on the Web)to be able to look up every single fictional character, place name, race, or the like from any fantasy series. Or science fiction, perhaps. Yes, I know, but I like to have projects to work on that I will never finish in my lifetime. It keeps me from getting too bored.
For starters, I've decided to go through the book I just finished, Tanith Lee's Mortal Suns, and try to do a quickie synopsis and character list, if not yet full-fledged pages for each one. I think it's due back at the library in a couple of days, so we'll see how far I get. I've already done some character lists from Mistress of The Empire and The Plains of Passage, and way back when I did them for a few other books, though without any annotation--just a list of names. Recently I was trying to gender-sort them, though, and that's hard when you don't remember the characters in question...
Anyway, if I don't surface much for the next little while, that's probably what I'm doing. Either that, or playing the CD version of Clue.
