The Frustrations of Software (2)

Note to reader: Things here are seriously geeky :) !

Well, as you will have read in the last "episode", I was getting pretty frustrated with Ubuntu's installation system.

So, I did something else for a while and then went to bed. This morning I was slowly recovering conciousness when a stray thought wandered through my mind ..... was I looking at an error message about my instruction, or one about myself ??? When you try to do an installation in Linux you either have to be an administrator or provide the admin's password. What I had done was create the system and a user ID for me without ever setting up a password for the root (or administrator) ID. OK. Look up how to do that, and do that. Great. Now go find the instructions on how to set up LAMP again. The ones for this that I used are here and seem pretty accurate.

Next, set up Apache and try out looking at the localhost site. It works - yippee ! OK. I'm doing something right here, so let's try for PHP too ! I'm going to try out PHP5, as that looks like the one I'll need to use in the future, at the very least.

Two swift commands later it seems that I've done it. I create a small php test file and get FireFox to look at it - it does, and shows all the php versioning, which is great !

Finally, MySQL. This is a database system very popular for use with web sites. Actually installing the database isn't particularly difficult, but the intricacies of some of the later setup have to be addressed carefully.

After all this said, however, I have to say that setting up a LAMP system is an amazingly easy thing to do. I have set up AMP systems on Windows before, and none of them have been as easy as this. The easiest thing these days appears to be getting your head around what appear to be crazy insane Linux/UNIX commands, but, in fact, they do make sense after a surprisingly short period.

Next; onwards and upwards: a small intro page and some tricks !

Note to reader: End-of-geek :) !

To finish with, the AG's daughter is learning the saxophone. I can see that she has a political career ahead of her !

Other good points of the weekend have been two-fold. Firstly, England beat Australia by 12 points to 10, and then France beat New Zealand by a similar margin - 20 to 18. Boy but it was tense in the last few minutes ! Now it'll be England vs France in one semi-final and South Africa vs Argentina in the other. Association Football appears to be standing aside gracefully over there for Rugby Union Football to be seen, which is a great spirit to show: I just hope the Pumas can show really well against the Springboks. We shall see.)

That's it for now. Have fun.

The Frustrations of Software (1)

Being a software engineer provides me with plenty of [Aaaaarrrgghh!!] moments - a my own expense, as you can imagine ! Despite this, I still haven't learned not to do things like tear my hair out, grit my teeth, and claw at the wall when things don't work the way the documentation promises faithfully that it does ! [Grrrrrr] is, I think, the technical term for it, but I haven't ever been able to find it in the dictionary.

Note to reader: from now on things get seriously geeky :) !

[Grrrrrr] moments normally happen when you're working on a piece of software that's (for you) totally new, so not only have you not much idea where to get help from, you also don't really understand what the help says when you do read it, as it assumes that you've got lots more experience than you actualy do have! The most recent [Grrrrrr] moments have been coming courtesy of the installation packages of an operating system called Ubuntu - a version (or "distribution") of Linux.

As I don't just have a spare PC for this I created what's called a Virtual Machine (sort of a PC in software, not hardware) to put the new OS into, and then downloaded the system and installed it with no problems whatsoever. Of course, my luck couldn't last ! According to the OS manual the installation is a simple one-liner, but as soon as I started trying to install the popular set of programs (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) that one can use for developing web sites I got a very persistent error message seemingly telling me I didn't have permission to do the installation.

Like I say, a [Grrrrrr] moment, so I'm writing this while deciding what alternative strategy to follow, as the online bug-reports, etc., seem to show that this isn't an unknown problem. Others may have got around it, but I don't have the time.

Oh yes, and all the lights went out, so I should post this and close down my other PC, I think !

Back later !

Back by Popular Demand !

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends ! Step inside ! Step inside ! ............. Yes, well. Since my last blog, that broke a fast of several months, I've been castigated for leaving it so long between blogs. Ok ! Ok ! I didn't actually realise that anyone out there read this stuff ([grin]) !

So, I've decided to make a to-do list (I can hear the cynical sniggering already ) of topics to cover soon:

Internet Music

Agile and Extreme Programming

A Second Riiview (see here on April 14, 2007)

TBA

I'll try not to wait 3 months between episodes! I would guess that some people will have no interest in programming, so I'll add light entertainment too !

Today I'm sitting in the bat-cave programming, so taking a moment off to write this. The AG just sent me this site - you should introduce you 7+-year-old to some of these tricks. However, there are some others:

• Is it Prime? For starters, not if it ends in an even number, 5, or 0 (that means divisible by 2 or 5). To check further, add all the digits, and keep adding until you have just 1 left. If that is 3, 6, or 9 then it's divisible by 3 and definitely not prime.
• The site gives an easier way of subtracting from 1000 (or similar). I find easier to take 1 from 1000 leaving 999. Then I don't have to carry at all. Afterwards I can just add the one back to the result !

Bye !

Variety is the Spice of Life

I was rather taken by Rita Tseng's drawing of such fun-loving sheep¹. You'll find them cavorting on GoEnglish.Com's site (I've forgotten what word I was looking for - sorry !), a good place to find word meanings, etc.

They conveniently lead to another subject - knitting. I've been learning rather a lot more than I ever expected to about knitting recently ! Totally aside from seeing the finished product in shops, as we all do every day, I've been introduced to raw wool, washed and dyed wools, roving, and hanks.

I've been re-introduced to the delights of turning a hank into a ball to knot from (much easier with a swift that when I had to stand in front of the fire on a winter's afternoon with my hands upraised like a priest and with a hank stretched between my wrists), and have discovered the tactile differences between wool blends with and without additions such as silk and nylon, etc. Some wools are specifically for making socks (and hand-knitted socks are lovely and soft to wear !), whereas others are for jerseys or sweaters or scarves or almost any other piece of apparel that you could imagine !

There's a huge community of knitters out there that also has a large intrusion into NetSpace and BlogSpace, amd many of them have a terrific sense of humour — good even for the "muggle" amongst them. Go here for a most unexpected link between knitting and rock !

^{1 -} The cartoon is copyright Rita Tseng and GoEnglish.com and used with their kind permission. Please respect their copyright.

Wilfs of the Post

Well, I was wandering aimlessly around various sites, clicking links as the whim took me, and I came across a shop in Hovingham in Yorkshire. It's a very nice, well-designed, and informative site, and worth a read. It also has some good links, especially if you're anywhere in the area.

Finally, on a more serious note, if you're a VB programmer by chance, Beth Massi does a neat blog of VB stuff. She writes clearly and explains things well (I need that !). Well worth a read.

Have fun until the next time everybody.

Hire a Thief to Catch a Thief ?

That's always been a popular saying, but the UN appears to be turning it to new use. You may not know where Zimbabwe ("Southern Rhodesia" for those die-hard colonials amongst us) is, but I'm sure that you'd find it curious that a country that has been systematically driving itself into bankruptcy over that last ten to fifteen years has a really serious chance of being the next head of the Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD).

Now this is a very interesting and worthwhile organisation, handling such subjects as Energy for Sustainable Development; Industrial Development; Air pollution/ Atmosphere; and Climate Change. Basically, this is the part of the UN that's hitting the world which actually affects us rich westerners. I'd say that we would want people to head this department who come from a successful economy - not from a failed one !

Now lets hear what the National Geographic Online has to say about the Zimbabwean economy.


The economy centers on farming, mining (Zimbabwe holds a tenth of the world's chromite), and manufacturing. Until drought struck in the early 1990s, the nation fed itself. Whites still own choice tracts, and land redistribution is a charged issue. Mugabe's government suddenly started seizing all white-owned commercial agricultural land in 2000. African settlers were being dumped on the land without required government support (including seed, water, and fertilizer). This chaotic land reform is causing massive declines in food production, and millions of Zimbabweans are at risk of famine. The economy is in crisis, with high inflation and unemployment rates.

Now that was written a little while ago. Zimbabwe now has massive food shortages and the world's fastest-shrinking economy. The money supply has an unusual problem - they have devalued the currency and want to print larger-denomination notes, because there will be less of them, meaning lower paper costs. However, they can't afford the ink to do it with ! In 2006, inflation passed 1,000%, but early 2007 saw 1,700%. Unemployment ranges from 70% to 80% and according to the World Health Organization Zimbabwe has the world's lowest life expectancy - a Zimbabwean can expect to live less than 40 years if he or she survives infancy.

As a shining example of how to deal with economic problems, in mid-2005, Zimbabwe demolished its urban slums and shantytowns, leaving 700,000 people homeless in an operation called “Drive Out Trash.” In 2006, the government launched “Operation Roundup,” which drove 10,000 homeless people out of the capital (non giving them anywhere else to live, of course).

Have I painted too bleak a picture of this situation ? Go and visit the BBC news site. The Beeb supported the fight for independence in Zimbabwe fiercely some thirty years ago, but appears to be having seconds thoughts now. It has some pretty accurate items today. Zimbabwe has about 13 million inhabitants. So what happens when Zimbabwe finally implodes ? Most foreigners there consider that more people are not leaving because they believe that they can't, not because they don't want to. Eventually necessity will win out over belief and a large number of people will leave. The question is, where to ? None of the surrounding countries can be called "wealthy", with the possible exception of South Africa, and one could hardly expect any of them to take in several millions of people !

Is this the government you want to advise the world on anything, least of all economics ?

I really don't think so.

Postscript: A few days after my original post the U.N. duly elected the representatives of the world's least competent government to advise us all on how best to develop our economies.

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo (or, "how the US commercialised a celebration").
This event is not Mexico's National or Independence day, but the celebration of the defeat of a small invading French force by an even smaller local Mexican force at Puebla in 1862.

By "small" I mean that there were 6,500 French soldiers and 4,500 Mexican militiamen involved - numbers that were "usual" in the wars of independence further north some 75 years before, but dwarfed by the scale of the armies raised in Europe between 1790 and 1815, during the Napoleonic conflicts. Of course, various web sites change the figures - the Mexican number seems pretty well agreed-upon, but the French force seems to vary, up to "three times the number of Mexicans" or more !

In Mexico this is a big celebration in the state of Puebla, but that's about it. In the USA, on the other hand, it's the cause for big promotions by food and drink companies. All in all, it seems like people in the US ( and I mean all the people, not just those who look like they might have walked quietly over the border last weekend ) have a predisposition towards partying this weekend. Probably because Spring has started and the weather is, at last, turning warm, and so let's all get out there and party ! May 5th is just a good time.

By the way, for those interested in "genuine" beer, Tecate is a popular beer, but is brewed by Labatt's, who live in Norwalk, VA. Labatts are owned by Interbrew of Belgium and FEMSA Cervesa of Mexico. Dos Equis shares the same distinctive heritage ! Personally I prefer Pacifico, brewed by the larger of the two Mexican brewing giants, Grupo Modelo, who also export Corona, Corona Light, Negra Modelo, Modelo Especial, and Modelo Light. Unfortunately, Anheuser-Busch owns 49% of Grupo Modelo, so things may soon get worse

For info, thanks to MEXonline. For the picture of a burrito, thanks to WikiBooks ! For ace food, thanks to the ladies in the Taco House restaurant at the bottom of Route 70 in NJ.

Celebration !

It's St. George's Day to day, so all you English should be out in the streets waving flags and jumping up and down like crazy people, celebrating the day of our patron saint, St. George.

How many of you will be doing that ?

Well, I might hazard a guess and say that Philip Johnston might be, but I doubt that, even in England, he'll see many frolickers. We're not very frolicky people, you see, we English.

You're far more likely to find us having a quick cuppa before getting back to work than having a celebration. Not at all like some ex-patriots, like the Irish, for instance (especially in the USA) who've co-opted almost the whole of March The Mexicans have grabbed May, and the United Statesians themselves start July off well and just keep on barbecuing 'till the bitter end !

So I'd like to appeal to all those English people out there, and all the anglophiles in the world, to start planning for next year's April 23rd. We can plan for great meals of mountains of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, gallons of rich dark gravy, and sweet young green peas cooked gently with mint. We can sing heart-rousing songs like Jerusalem, and play dragon-slaying games.