15 Megs of Fame




Diaryland is da bomb I just *have* to tell you how much this all sucks. Who're these other people he's writing about? Who's the freak writing this, anyway? What's gone before. What's going on right now? Where do *you* visit on the web? What're you building right now?


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Another smart-assed remark from Mike
You mean I have to edit configuration files by hand again? How primitive.
1:00:00 on 1999-11-17

You wouldn't think web development would be this hard, even for somebody as mushy-brained as I am these days.

I want to work on my domain. Fair enough. So I need some development tools, and I still have an itching feeling that I want another webhost besides Dreamhost, simply because I can't afford them, even though they may be the best bet.

First I decide to tackle the webhost problem.

First, I have a lot of stuff I want to do with my site. I figure 100 megs is more than enough, so I am shooting for something in the 75-100 meg range, CGI, allows database access, telnet, what have you.

Of course, there are a few niceties I would like, such as making arbitrary subdomains (like journal.restlessmind.com or news.restlessmind.com) point to a subdirectory, so it can be a completely different entry point for the site.

It'd be really nice if they offered a mailing list manager like majordomo to have my notify list, and a few other lists I have in mind. I don't mean a distribution list thing, only, but an actual discussion list.

I want custom error pages. I don't know why, it's just important to me.

For the nature of the site I'm interested in, crontabs are pretty important.

Of course, I want all the usual (pop account(s), unlimited aliases, responders, blah, blah).

Ideally, these would come with the default plan. [smirk]

So I start to look around.

There's this one place that looks ideal, with all the extras, even if it's a little pricey for me right now ($30 a month; usually, $30 a month was a joke. Now it's like, "you want how much?!"). Then again, that's why I want away from Dreamhost, the price, but I get all the extras with them, I start to check them out.

At the web rating places, it seems like everywhere else: some people absolutely love them, some people absolutely hate them. I check the site, and it seems to be okay, at least until I go into their user-only forums using their demo account username and password and start reading the inside gab.

Apparently not all is right in paradise. Their majordomo servers are reportedly very slow (post a message, and subscribers get them anywhere from hours to days later), Their CGI is slow at times, intermittent connectivity problems... that sort of thing.

No thanks. I have that sort of service from my ISP already.

So I look at one of my "backups." $24 a month, big space, lots of transfer, CGI, etc. I email them to ask about subdomains, mailing lists and custom error pages. They want relatively exorbitant rates for the subdomains, and they would just point to the same root web directory. The mailing list manager is similarly questionable and expensive.

No thanks.

So I am investigating a webhost someone recommended and uses for her site. $10 a month, 100 megs, "unlimited" transfer, mailing lists, blah, blah, blah. I have yet to email them to ask questions, but I have one really outstanding question, regarding database access: they offer msql rather than mysql.

I downloaded both for Windows. I don't know why, but for some reason, I feel like msql has the cold pricklies while mysql, while not the easiest, has some more warm fuzzies than msql does. Plus, I have decent docs for mysql, and lots of online tutorials. And more supporting scripts online, etc.

Granted, they're probably extremely similar; in fact, from my cursory examination of some php code, it appears that I could do most of the same things by just changing "mysql" to "msql" in function calls, as long as I set up the databases, import my data properly, etc.

I remain unconvinced, though. So I need to ask them about that, among other things.

Why can't I do this with the database I'm familiar with? Sure, FileMaker Pro is a Mac-a-like program, but I got thrust into it unawares and really got into it. I like it. I grok it. And it's fast and flexible enough for what I need, anyway.

Such is life. I always know the wrong tools.

Maybe if I strike it rich I'll just stay with Dreamhost.


Speaking of software... I was looking for a good, CGI/database web development solution to set up on Gillian, since I can't afford even a decrepit little Linux box (think used 486 DX4/100 stuffed with lots of secondhand FPM memory, a couple hand-me-down IDE disks, cheapie no-name 10/100 Mb ethernet card and a KVM switch to share monitor, keyboard and trackball with Gillian (and someday, when I actually have money again, it'll make a quasi-decent firewall for the house or office network, or at least a printer server)) to run all my server-side stuff right now.

I've been using Xitami's web server for a while now, but I figured if I want to go and do a lot of wild stuff, I ought to just go ahead, bite the bullet and go Apache/php/mysql.

There's a port of it with the php module for Apache and the msql database engine for Win32, available at the Cygwin Porting Project. Oddly enough, it comes without much in the way of documentation, except for php, which comes with the full docs in HTML format. Also, it didn't run happily on my system, mostly because it assumed I had the Cygwin C/C++ compiler 20.1 installed. I did. Once. I didn't care for it (my attention span was far too short for command line anything back then), so I uninstalled it.

I didn't feel like untangling the mess, and so I started uninstalling and looking for alternative solutions.

Finally, I ended up with what I had already -- standalone php3, Xitami and ActiveState Perl, and running mysql. I don't know why I was trying to fix what wasn't broken, but there you have it.

As of this writing, I don't know if msql will work for me or not. I would like a well-behaved build of the engine, and there may be one, but it'd be nicer if the webhost just let me use mysql rather than msql. Anyway, everybody seems to know mysql, so wouldn't it look better on my r�sum�?

I sat around and dinked with a tutorial off Webmonkey and enlightenment hit. This stuff actually makes sense. Score another victory for Webmonkey.

It's totally bizarre how I can have no conception of how something is supposed to work, see a couple examples, play with it a little, and it oozes down into the cracks of my mind and makes (basically-)perfect sense with essentially no practice.

The proof is in the coding, though. [gulp]


There's this woman (let's call her Tabitha) that I got pretty close to for a while. However, Tabitha disappeared in late August. That's right, just out-and-out disappeared. Poof, off the face of the earth, as far as I or anybody else knew.

About two weeks later, she reemerged. It turns out, she'd come perilously close to the edge, herself, and had been in the hospital a while. I was incredibly happy to see her, but she still didn't seem quite "right."

She admitted as much, too.

After that night, she never reemerged.

Tonight I was waiting to hear from Gurugrrl, so every time I heard a knock-knock-knock on ICQ, I checked to see who it was. And so I let my pointer hover over the icon for ICQ in the system tray.

"Tabitha is online." My stomach felt funny, and I was on it in a minute.

I sent a message, "Ohmigawd. Where have you been?!"

Before I could hit send, she disappeared, and my heart sank.

I tapped in, "Hey, I *saw* you... don't just disappear again... argh."

Is Tabitha having some of her (previously?) infamous connectivity problems? Is she simply not speaking to anybody? Just to me (turned against me by Hypochondria and her cronies)? Maybe it's not her... maybe it's her family... going through her effects?

I don't like the idea of this at all. I emailed her a short message asking her to tell me if she's okay, what's up, get lost, or whatever.

restlessmind


Ancient history:
2013-03-01"You'll be stone dead in a moment!"
2007-08-07I covet fuck you money
2007-07-16My own long, dark tea-time of the soul
2007-07-11My internet experience is lacking
2007-07-10Coincidence



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