I have been fairly busy since my last post, working hard in my day/night job, but also trying to find new employment. In addition to that I have been making some time to see friends. The Bank Holiday weekend was perfect for this.

I went out for meals, went out for drinks, went out for drives, even went out for a bonfire!

All this time away from home means that very little learning got done. Saying that though, I spent a relaxing Sunday morning in front of the telly, set aside the MySQL/PHP/Apache for this week, and concentrated on making my personal site from a HTML frame based page, to one that runs on stylesheets instead. This went very well, I thought.

There are some new pics on my personal site, and some new pics on my DeviantArt page, so check them out.

Oh, and I made my very first video! Multimedia expert in the making…. lol

Yes, me and my wife spent 4 days with my little brother at his university, and pretty much drank those days away. Tuesday was Pirate Night. We also went to see 300 at the cinema. That film rocked!

Yesterday my internet connection was down, so I felt a little cut off from the world, so I worked on learning about CSS style sheets, also sorted thru some new pics to add to my personal site.

Today I will be going bowling with my friend James for his birthday. Happy Birthday James!

The first thing that I watched was this great anime called “Sumomomo Momomo – The Strongest Bride on Earth”. It’s about a strong warrior girl, Momoko, who wants to marry and have a child with a boy from another clan. The thing is, he doesn’t.For more info, check out this wikipedia page.
After that, I watched “Heroes”. I was lucky enough to catch an episode on the SciFi channel recently, and was instantly hooked. I wanted to see it from the start tho, and last night watched episode 01. Hiro Nakamura is definately going to be my favourite I think :pFor more info, check out this wikipedia page.
Finally, I watched “Final Fantasy VII: Last Order”. When they brought out the Final Fantasy Unlimited anime series, I was expecting something like this. It revolves around some of the cut scenes from the FF7 game, and it rocks!For more info, check out this wikipedia page.

The rest of the night was spent making a new desktop wallpaper, which you can see here.

As for today, well, not so much time in front of the computer, as I went to see a mortgage advisor (scary stuff).

Gonna have a quick game of Runescape, then maybe an early night as I have work tomorrow. Alas.

I have built a small site where I can post random things that are unrelated to my ‘professional’ work, ie – photos of friends on nights out, emdedded video clips that I enjoy. As time goes on I’m sure I’ll add more to it.

The site name is based on my Runescape name, and you can find it here.

It’s quite simple and small for now, but it was only an overnight job to satisfy the request of a friend. Enjoy!

Everything seems to make sense, so far. It’s strange getting into the mindset of learning, not having been a student for over 4 years now, and especially learning something so rooted in mathematics. Despite that, I am reading the book a lot, with reiteration and practical excercises most of it is sinking in.

I have yet to do anything practical that would be worth referencing here, at the moment it seems I am learning to hold my paintbrush and dip it in the paint, actually painting a picture will be a few chapters away.

This morning though, I woke up, not entirely refreshed, but still mentally prepared to overcome the obstacle. With Neon Genesis Evangelion in my dvd player, i set out to conquer.

A solution was not immediately apparent, so I went back, uninstalled everything. I decided sidestep the quick installation and tried the more detailed method of installing the MySQL database, the Apache server and the PHP scripting. Each of these have their own chapter.

Installation of MySQL was no problem, Apache also was pain free, PHP was a simple zip file, but when it came to configuring Apache to recognise php that is where I ran into the same problem. I couldn’t figure out why, as the error log said it couldn’t locate a particular file, which I knew was there (“c:/php/php5apache2.dll”). Several readings of the chapters could not garner a solution, so off I went to google, as I’m sure someone else has had this same problem.

And they had!

And so for anyone following the same early steps as myself, here is your solution. Click here.

My thanks go out to klimaks and jedhunsaker. You guys have made my day! I might even get time now to upload my pictures from last night.

Supplemental -

My joy was short lived. Something in the system was not working right and I couldn’t access php files in my browser other than the localhost confirmation.
I spend a few hours researching various methods of resolving this, but as I’m not going to be focusing on the coding side of making these programs work, I found another option.

XAMPP.

This is installed and running perfectly, I can even make php pages and view them! This will be all for tonight, I’m off to get some food.

It is a book on PHP, MySQL and Apache.

My experience with these areas in minimal to say the least, and I intend to learn a lot from this book (the ultimate outcome being my ability to make websites with shopping carts). I will be posting on regular occasions the things I am learning, in the hope that somehow re-iterating it will help it sink in more.

The book was £25, I haven’t spent that much on a ‘proper’ book since I was at university 4 years ago! But I feel it is necessary, until such a time that the writers of X-Men come up with a comprehensive guide on databases and servers.

If anyone out there should read this blog, please offer constructive advice where you can, as I am eager to learn more.