How to NOT set up a development server

Well, it’s been a harrowing adventure, I think. I’m teaching myself PHP and naturally needed a development server. Before christmas I would have had the choice of trying to coax an old Pentium II generic-beige-box thing back to life (it came to my little retirement home of ancient and decrepit technology with an advanced case of Dust-Bunnies Disease) back to life or running a virtual server off of my slowly aging desktop. I didn’t like the idea of trying to bring a computer sitting comfortably at the end of my little tech island holding other odds-and-ends back into a production setting where it had to be relied upon to do some pretty hefty lifting for a Pentium II. I also didn’t like the idea of cluttering my aging gaming PC (the main desktop, and “gaming” is used loosely, it runs 4-year-old games great, because that’s what it was built for, anything newer than that and it starts to show it’s middle aged-ness) with more processes like a PHP server. Not only that, but virtual servers on the same computer you’re using never work the same way as an actual external box.

But, Santa gives good gifts to good little boys, and I got a respectable new desktop computer to use for modern gaming (“modern” being things like Spore and that type of game, definitely not a Crysis box, but then again point out an actual Crysis box to me). So, I had a brilliant idea. You know what a 4-year-old (in human years, in tech years it’s about 50 or so) gaming PC could do fairly easily? That’s right, it can do a fair immitation of a PHP development server, so rather than adding it to the Geriatric Home for Oldies-but-Goodies, I downloaded Ubuntu Server 9.04 (Yes, Ubuntu, because I’m a Windows Wimp interested in becoming a real geek, but just needs to have something not quite as fiddly as Linux during the School season) and wiped out that 250 GB drive faster than most can blink.

From the install screen I picked LAMP and OpenSSH and then let it go. It rebooted and I used WinSCP to SSH into my box (which is sitting 2 feet away, but I don’t want to use a screen to watch a terminal blink at me, besides, that’s more authentic, and when I own an actual server out there on the web it’ll be more like this experience). It took me about an hour and lots of web searching, but I finally found out that Apache2 uses /var/www as the location for the web server, and that is owned by root, and you can’t modify that until you chmod or chown. I understand chown and get that it really isn’t the secure way to do things, but I don’t know how to get chmod to work.

Well, why don’t you learn? Some of you might ask. Well, because I get Windows, it makes sense, GUI’s are understandable and easy, and I’ve spent most of my life with them. I’m trying to learn, but, running primarily on Windows and Linux as a hobby, you don’t learn very many of the commands, what I really should do is bite the bullet, leave Windows 7 (which would make me sad) and just go Linux only for a while. Cold turkey, it’d be hard but eventually I’d adapt, and hopefully I’ll learn some of the tricks to Linux, and move a little past being the basic Ubuntu user, not that there’s anything wrong there, I just want to know what I’m doing and get some real geek cred.

That was a little off topic. So after a little bit of fiddling I got the thing to work for me and I went about teaching myself a little PHP, and then the issues started. The computer has a few issues, age being one of them. And with age comes shaking out of the motherboard. Now, on the board in that pc there’s a little fan on top of one of the chips, not entirely sure which, but it has to do something, well the fan got stuck and now whatever it is, is overheating which leads to many issues. Really, I’m a horrible person for trying to get this dying PC to keep working, but I want to get this thing to work.

Now, I said it worked for me. And it does, as a personal development server, it’s just fine, there’s no problem of security, because it’s behind a router, so you can go ahead and punch as many holes and chown as many files as you want. But, I need to know how to do this stuff securely for the actual web. Not only that, but I want to get to know more than just PHP. So, I took it upon myself to fiddle with Apache, decided it wasn’t enough and installed Bind9. I tried to set it up so that on computers that know how I can redirect URL requests to the server. And that’s where I killed it.

Yep, me and my non-knowledge ended up in me messing with a config file somewhere that messed up Bind which in turn made Apache angry, and the whole thing stopped accepting requests made to the machine’s IP address. So, I whipped out my CD again and clean installed the thing, that was yesterday. About once an hour I’ve given up trying to get everything the way I want with the amount of wrong turns I’ve made, and it takes about five minutes to install a clean version of the whole server. So, I think as of this writing I’m on the 11th install on this poor old system.

In other news, I can write a little bit of PHP, so if you want to hire me, I need the money, I type fast and since I’m colour blind I won’t question you on your design choices. Still working on payment though, I’m eventually making it over to my bank to get the online thing setup (because I waited too long to make my profile, or something, so I have to go in and talk to them) and then I hope I can link it to a Paypal or Google Checkout account.

I know I’ve said this before, but I’m going to try to update this blog a little more, you know, build a community and stuff like that. Because, I need people who I can crawl to when I’ve decided that Linux is hard and I need somebody to walk me through the basics again, and again, and again.

See I only forget…

…for like six months or something and then I remember about you again.

In the interim, I have begun running Chrome, loved it, and then left it for Firefox again (Really, Chrome team, I need my plug-ins, at the very least give me a NoScript dealie in the UI). I have downloaded, and am running Windows 7 x64 build 7000 on my main desktop. The desktop also received a much needed upgrade. It went from an AMD 3800+ to an Intel Core2Quad Q6600. The gpu went from an nVidia 6600LE (you’ve heard me complain about that before) to an nVidia 8800GTS (finally a real-ish graphics card). It went from 3 GB DDR ram to 2 GB DDR2, which I don’t think is a downgrade, but I definitely think I need to get to sticking more RAM in here, because modern operating systems want more than that measly amount.

You know, I’ve even wondered about virtualizing XP? I still like to play some old games that won’t run on this hardware, so a VM seems like a perfect solution. I just need school to lighten up before I try to do anything like that.

[Aside] I promise I’ll do a whole little Win7 run through soon, just like I did with the Vista beta I had.

I’ve also been teaching myself a few things. And by a few, I mean that when I collate them all together it looks like a daunting list. So, here they are: Japanese, Spanish, C++, web design, how to start a business, and graphic design. I’m sure I forgot a few, and I’m sure that I’m not progressing as quickly as say, a person enrolled in a class for these, but I’m a sucker for projects about things that I don’t know and puzzle me. It’s a way to divert my mind from school work.

I participated in NaNoWriMo last year, and only got to 25,000 words. Which is half way, but I wanted to get closer than that. Can you guess what my main hang up was? School. As November started all the classes started assigning more homework. I had 20 pages to read in English a night (I read slowly) and upwards of 30 pre-calc problems a night. Then of course you factor in physics, chemistry, and it ends up being enough work to keep you from writing the fantastical novel you have floating in your head. So, I’m still slowly chipping away at it, but I’m only up to 35,000 words, and have started a few more stories that I would like to get working on as well. I hate it when I get creative juices flowing for stories other than the one I’m writing.

I believe that’s all for right now. I need to finish a last bit of chem. homework and then I’m off to the land of the unconscious, and won’t be back until an hour before sunrise. G’night.

So begins another year

As many younger than the age of 18 know, school is an unstoppable force. It gobbles you up in August, opens its mouth for air in December/January, and spits you out May (if you’re unlucky June). Well, the vicious cycle begins again, ungodly early, half way through August on the 13^th of that month.

This unfortunate turn of events means that soon my unbridled creativity, free roaming mind, and gobs of free time, will be cut down to (what is sure to be) nil. The reasoning for this drastic cut is that I was foolish when I signed up for classes. I decided I would take Physics and Chemistry this year, I’ll have my friend taking the same classes so we should be able to collaborate on homework because he is incredibly gifted in this area where as I get it but usually after the test. Along with the two sciences I’ll be taking AP English, which proves to be fun since I should be getting the mandatory summer reading books in by the end of this week, giving me approximately one week to read two novels; along with the book list I (along with the rest of the AP kids) have been tasked with filling out a list of 145 AP lit terms, this also has to be completed before school starts, and is vying for time amid my laziness, and the need to read two other books. To top it all off I decided that I would take the Honors Pre-Calc, which jumps me into the “Junior taking Senior Honors level” of snobbery. I thought I would do this so that I could avoid the dead heads who would be plodding through necessary courses. It was revealed to me after I signed up for Pre-Calc Honors that all the dead-heads would be taking Algebra 3, rather than proceeding on into Calculus territory. It was also revealed that while Pre-Calc itself is the class for people who knew the material enough to get atleast a high ‘C’ in Algebra, Pre-Calc Honors is for the kids who easily got an ‘A’ in Algebra. This turn of events made my eyes glaze over and roll up into my head along with needing to sit down, but that’s another tale. I am one of the kids that easily kept an ‘A’ (if somewhat on the > 95% side) in Algebra 2, so my teacher hardly batted an eye when I asked for her signature to get me into the class, she did warn me that I probably should think about not taking too many challenging classes in other areas.

After the sheer foolery of “I kept ‘A’s in my classes all year long, so let’s keep on with the challenging” subsided I realized that I still had one (with a chance of two) slot(s) left to fill for my next school year. I chose a low stress, fun class of Drama 2 followed by Children’s Theater in the Spring; not because I’m a slacker (seep the above paragraph), but because I realized that I needed a fun environment to distress before I went home to try tackling the inevitable mountains of homework that would await me. Before much longer I realized how much I loved hanging out in the music/drama wing/hallway, so I signed up for choir. Surprise, having a good voice makes you advance in the ranks and the choir teacher put me into the concert choir, which is a step up from “Men’s Choir”, though I can’t say it’s much of a step because the person that I (with affectionate hatred in my eyes) refer to as ‘The Prince of Italy’ (because not a day goes by that he reminds me that he is related to the royal lines of Italy, to which I tell him to go to school for rich kids, in Italy, if he indeed is. Which keeps him quiet for the next hour or so) was able to get in with his cracking tenor, somewhat off-key tendencies, and stuttering nature. Those two should be fun, although I now won’t have an off block to study/complete homework/sleep.

That is the state of things as they stand today. And hah, there is in fact real content that goes on this blog rather than a string of “I’m not dead yet” posts.

Congratulations, I’m not copy-editing this, leave a comment if you see a glaring spelling/grammatical errors. Though I doubt you’ll find one because I wrote this in Word, which has a sparkling role-model of a grammar checker, one that makes all other word processors weep at it’s feet.

I bid you, for now, a fairwell.

What do you know? More stuff on here!

‘Been a while hasn’t it, O ye devout readers of this blog? Well, our sister site 100Watts which sports a rather trendy and flashy video podcast (or will soon) has come out with it’s first episode! It features me, seeing as I single-handedly run both of these blogs.

Direct link for those of you who don’t believe me. Or if you just want to play masochist and watch me poorly act, and flare up in episodes of, what some might consider, hysteria. Well, that’s that. I’ll put more stuff up eventually, meanwhile you can go and check out what’s keeping me away from this particular blog by browsing through the myriad of links that are in the blogroll (over in the general right direction –>). Or by looking through the following links:

lcarsos.deviantart.com
twitter.com/lcarsos

“I’m not dead yet!”

Well, to those of you who regularly visit the blog, I thank you. To the two of you that visited from the comic font search, if you want to know the font I use is called “Comic Book” and it’s freely available at 6500 free fonts, which is completely spyware free you actually download the ttf file, or at 1001freefonts.com, I can’t say it’s spyware free, but I would assume so.

Now, I make this post to tell you that I am indeed not dead, nor do I plan to be for another 60-70 years. So, I’ll blog a bit more often, as soon as I get an opinion on something, and have enough time again to write it down.

As for 100W, well, all I can say right now is that it is not dead. Fun stuff coming down the Alpine slide (or pike, if you wish). I know I keep saying that, but next week is Spring break, so I expect to have lots of time to produce content, gee I hope blip.tv didn’t delete my account.

Something new

I’m going back and making the rounds, and I just thought you might want to know, I’m not dead yet. Just near on dead with work. I’ll get back eventually.

Comic 7 – Someone snuck into the studio

I’m so sick of typing this in, this is the third spot I have posted it to, so I’ll spice it up, just for you! Anyways [To be read in a staunchy art galleria type voice], I think that the work here, denotes that the people in the comics have their own lives. And that it takes a great amount of work to assemble a comic of such high caliber. So obviously, somebody has snuck into the studio, and his now taking a picture of the director. He’s getting his due now, and everyone knows who the director is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Look, its that time of year again. The time at which teachers remember, Oh yes there’s that huge final that covers everything we were supposed to do. Yes it is rush-to-catch-up time!!! Now, nearly all projects have been stored in airtight sandwich sized baggies and placed on top of my desk. This means that when finals are done, I will be able to resume work on my personal life. This means after finals my priorities are, in this order:

1.  Finish up that comic and send it out on the zipline.

2. Finish that script for ep. 19 O’ 100W.

3. Shoot Episode 19 O’ 100W.

4. Polish Episode 19 (includes photoshopping out the host).

5. Send it out on the blipline.

6. Work on writing

7. Learn PHP (may save for a rainy day, not a cold day with hot chocolate

8. Research that English project that continues on despite Winter Break, and a shuffling of teachers

9. Probably Draw another comic\think up another ep.

10. Open presents

11. Stay locked in room with presents till end of Winter Break

Alright I lied

Yes, there was no comic that came out I realize that. I was thinking about different things (mainly how to optimize my workflow). But, no excuses I do have several comics I would like to get out there, I just need to get this drawing of a semi-main character of the entire strip done. Mainly just so that I can have the guy in this one particular comic, but I would like him to be a recurring character. That being said, I need to be a perfectionist about this. So just wait, be patient.

P.S. I would also like to get out a 100W sometime before Halloween, but that’s never going to happen.

Can’t I?

Isn’t there a way to get wordpress to put up posts based on an RSS feed? I’d like to shake things up a bit, but I can’t figure out how to import my Tumblr RSS feed.

Just an update, I have a comic in the making, it should appear over the weekend or early next week, or sometime later than that.