Lab notes

Backpack is an elegant, easy-to-use web-based service for capturing ideas, managings todos, and organizing anything you can write, link or upload. And it’s coming from the same people who brought us Basecamp. Best of all, you can use it for free, or pay $5-$19/month for different service plans.

Backpack’s a fun combination wiki, weblog, to-do list and calendar that’s featureful but not overwhelming. Make a page that contains check-offable lists, images, dated notes, and files about a project or idea. Link pages and share them with others for collaborative editing. Set up reminders that get sent to your email or mobile device about project deliverables - or to water the plants or pay the rent. Subscribe to page changes in your newsreader, and reminders in your calendar applicaton. (Lifehacker)

Link to Backpack.

Just in time education vs Just in case education

To get started, I needed an environment with Apache, PHP and MySQL running on my development machine (a Windows XP notebook).

Installing MySQL

Installing MySQL 4.1 was just as easy. Once again I opted to run it from the command line, to be more precise, I didn’t know any better. The installer does come with a nice GUI configuration tool that sets up the MySQL file system and takes care of all the different options. I ran MySQL from the command line (mysqld) and used mysqladmin to create a database and mysql to create and populate a table.

I borrowed a test script from http://www.php.net and changed it to run a query on my database. This is when I learned that PHP 5 does not come pre-installed with MySQL support. I had to enable MySQL support in the php.ini configuration file (located in the windows directory), and copy the two MySQL support DLLs to the system32 directory. Restart Apache and everything is working as expected.

Looking for GUI tools, I found out MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser. After installing the MySQL Administrator, I discoverd that MySQL also includes a system tray monitor with a sleek GUI for setting up and controll services. And it also integrates with MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser.

Since I already had the database setup, I didn’t get to use MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser much, but I was impressed with the quality of the UI, and the breadth of features offered by the UI and the underlying MySQL engine. It’s definitely on par with the expensive you-know-who database servers out there.

To get started, I needed an environment with Apache, PHP and MySQL running on my development machine (a Windows XP notebook).

Installing PHP

PHP 5 also has several download options. I started with the installer package which was a breeze to install. The documentation states that it doesn’t include installation for Apache, which I assumed I could fix by using ApacheConf. It turns out that the installer does not include any of the libraries required to use Apache, nor a lot of other extras. So I found myself downloading the larger Zip package and extracting it on top of the installation directory.

I configured Apache to load the PHP module, use it for .php documents and support index.php as the directory index. I then setup a directory for the project and created a test page that calls phpinfo(). It worked on the first try.

To get started, I needed an environment with Apache, PHP and MySQL running on my development machine (a Windows XP notebook).

Installing Apache

I downloaded the latest version of Apache 2. I previously used Apache on Linux boxes, so I’m all too familiar with running it from the command line, and since this is my daily machine, I opted to not have it running as a Windows service all the time. Turns out I was wrong.

It’s easier when you don’t have many command line windows open, and Apache comes with a nifty tray utility that allows me to monitor and start/stop the service. I figured that out while trying to use ApachConf, which can only restart Apache (after making configuration updates), if Apache is installed as a service. All too often, you need to reinstall the product to change from command line to Windows service, but breezing through the documentation I learned that with Apache it only took one step:
apache -k install

Configuring Apache 2 is generally not complicated, but I did want to test some GUIs, so I also installed ApacheConf. Sadly, I couldn’t get the PHP wizard to work. I think I figured out why, but at that point it seemed like manually setting the two configuration options was my best shot. ApacheConf is a ‘better http.conf editor’, definitely useful if I was running managing machines or running multiple virtual servers.