Goodbye (for now)

I don't know how Im going to pay all this back guys, but I'm really grateful to you all. I think Tannin already told you that I ... er ... had to raise a little cash to cover my expenses. Well, anyway, I'd just like to say thankyou to Dave and JoJo and Mercutio and Fool and Fushigi and Belinda and cquinn and E_dawg and Kristi and Mutiah and the Soup Nazi. Oh, and Tannin too.

I'm a bit tired after the walk home, but I'll chat to you all tomorrow.

Thanks guys.

PS: Cquinn, my friend, I am going to be extra, extra careful with my spelling from now on.

PPS: Fushigi: Don't worry. I never want to see another banana again as long as I live!
 
Indeed, drinks on the house.

Welcome home Tea.

Now I can take down the Help Wanted sign, my helper and friend made it safely back. Whenever you're ready Tea, you can give me a hand with the bar. Although I must admit, things have been relatively quiet. Oh, we get enough customers through here, they're just not as rambunctious as they’ve been in the past. Tea, maybe you can do some PR work and get a couple of our old customers back. I miss having Groltz and James around.
 
Welcome back Tea! Good to have you back.

Bartender said:
Indeed, drinks on the house.

Welcome home Tea.

Now I can take down the Help Wanted sign, my helper and friend made it safely back. Whenever you're ready Tea, you can give me a hand with the bar. Although I must admit, things have been relatively quiet. Oh, we get enough customers through here, they're just not as rambunctious as they’ve been in the past. Tea, maybe you can do some PR work and get a couple of our old customers back. I miss having Groltz and James around.
Click to expand...

Hear hear Bartender. Actually, does anyone know whats happening with Groltz and James? Haven't heard from these 2 for quite some time :(

Cheers
 
James is probably too busy with his new job at Cables&Wireless to visit us anymore while I think Groltz had issues with some of the positions certain of our members vocaled a few months ago. He at least wrote once about his disagreement with popular opinions expressed in the P&B in the past, so I guess that's why he left, hopefully only temporarily.
 
By the way, if anyone has noticed, I'm not here much of late. No, it's not because Flagreen was rude to Tannin in another thread. (Or was Tannin rude to Flagreen? Whatever. Personally, I hope it was the former. Apart from breakfast, I usually think that being rude to Tannin is the best possible way to start the day.)

Nope. It's because we have a major project in the works. Tannin, lord help him, is now webmaster of a community group wiki. Yeek! MediaWiki administration, php scripting, user permissions, MySQL - he is way over his head. (And loving it.)

This project, it is safe to presume, will continue to soak up masses of his free time. Right now, he is hopelessly enmeshed in doing the documentation. A lot of it can be borrowed from existing GFDL wikis and adapted to suit, but a good deal of it needs to be written from scratch. Big job.

But (with a little help from me) he is on top of it, at least so far.

Meanwhile, I'm not allowed to use the computer for more than 5 minutes a day.

sigh
 
Sounds like you (er Tannin) will be busy for a while! I don't know how much you know of php/mysql, but the one book I bought helped me to get started for both of those including the understanding of functions, variables, and even some OO.

Begining PHP4
Wrox

If you already know the PHP/MySQL basics, then skip this book.

Feel free to post scripts if you want/need help/comments on them. One the most frustrating things I found while learning PHP/MySQL was finding ways to combat specific battles. Reverse engineering other people's scripts to learn gets old very fast. (mostly tiring)

On a related note to being absent, I've not been around as much either. Laura and I have been on the hunt for a house now for several months. We found one a few weeks back and plan to close soon. Trying to manage the people we need to work with has been taking up good portions of my time. We almost bought a house prior to this one until our inspection told us to steer clear. (very bad well water) That was 2 months of work wasted at the final moments. (it took 5 weeks to even formulate the offer and get it accepted) The seller was a stubborn female dog who didn't want to spend a dime to make her house more sell-able. Oh well, now she's stuck with it.
 
Thankyou Doug.

I'm going to need to learn lots! Sometime over the next few days I'm going to have to make time to slip down the street and take your advice at my local bookshop.

Funny thing, it never occured to me to buy a book! I buy books like an alcoholic buys beers, but this will be the first computer-related book I've bought in ... oh ... 10 years or so, I guess. (Why buy books when my friends at Storage Forum teach me all I need to know?)

Function, variables and OO I'm probably OK with - I think the basics I picked up in my Modula-2 days will suffice - but I know absolutely nothing about php or mySQL.

I have hosting through Arvixe. Early days yet, but they seem excellent to me. Anyone here tried them?

The codebase I have to work with is MediaWiki. If anyone is interested I can post more details. Right now I'm using v 1.2.6, which still has certain stuff that should be in the css hardcoded into the scripts. That's probably been fixed in the latest 1.3 but I don't think 1.3 has settled down enough for me to want to use it yet.

So I'm learning a little php by the simple method of pawing through the code looking for hard coded HTML. I am certainly a long, long way of being competent in php, but I have at least got to the stage where I can usually work out which bits I can tinker with and which bits I need to leave alone!

I think some solid reading is called for.

For those interested, the site I'm working on is currently at http://www.ben.arvixe.com Later on, it will switch over to a long-term URL.
 
If you've done any work with Perl, I think you may find that some of PHP shares a close relation to function functionality. The book I suggested was probably geared more to my liking because I had no clue about variables, functions, or any understanding of OO. Now I only have a partial clue, but it's better than no clue. If you alreay know functions, variables, and some OO, then you might find it to be a boring read (because it is simplistic).

If you haven't worked with things like GET and POST data, "cleaning" data, and includes, then it might be usefull. The book takes a little bit of everything and explains how each function plays a vital role to a very simple example. Keep in mind the book I recommend is a bit dated, so it misses some vital security concerns that I've only learned through reading numerous online sites. (those securirty issues may not have been known at the time the book was written)

One nice thing you may soon find is how easy it is to access data in a mysql database with php. Since I can never remember each function, I recommend looking up how each function works on www.php.net.

I also recommend trying Zend Studio 3.0 Client. They offer a free evaluation for 21 days. Once the 21 day trial expires, you can resubmit for a "personal edition" license which reduces some of the functionality of their product, but it is still a decent free tool with a debugger, code coloring and completion. If you don't want to register on their site, I can send you my evaluation code by PM.

I don't know how ambitious your getting, but you might want to test your development locally. Personally I install my own apache/php/mysql setup on my home machine so that if my script causes an issue (which I can say it has many times) that it doesn't cause you downtime on your web hosting account. I don't open port 80, so it's not visible to anyone but myself.

I'll gladly try to pass along any tips I've found over the past couple years. It might not be much, but it could save you the headache of trying to find the answer elsewhere. I can also post some PHP functions that I've created which may/may not help you with your website. Let me know if you're interested.
 
Nope. Far as I know, Pearl is a Janis Joplin album.

I just laid out $100 on PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. It was the best-looking (and easily the most expensive) of the three PHP titles I found in a local bookshop. It's a massive great tome, but on very fast first glance, it seems readable and at a good level. I hope I don't discover that I'm in way over my head!

Anyway, I plan on going quiet for a few days while I try to absorb this thing. And also, while I wipe out my wiki and do a practice restore. I'd be pretty damn pissed off if I lost all my work at this stage. On the other hand, if I don't test it now and wait till I have a real disaster, I might lose 100 times as much data. Sometime over the weekend, I'll grit my teeth, and do a full restore.

If that works, then maybe I'll try my hand at upgrading the MediaWiki software from 1.2.4 to 1.3 beta 2.

(Or maybe I won't.)

Anyway, thanks for your help so far Doug (more useful already than you might imagine), and wish me luck!
 
Thanks Coug. Funny you should mention that one, it was one of the other two that I decided not to get in favour of this one. Reasons? In rough order of importance:

* I need to know PHP and MySQL (and doubtless the tricky bits of interfacing one to the other, which are more likely to be covered in a book about both than in two books, one about one and the other about the other).

* The PHP 5 thing put me off. PHP 5 is still in test status, and it's PHP 4 I'm working with. PHP 5 knowledge can come another day when I'm actually running it.

* I flicked through all three and all seemed to have the sort of stuff I need, but this, although the biggest and the heaviest by far, seemed at least as readable (looking at a few random pages) as the others.

* This one, although published by an American company, was actually written by two Australians - Victorians, no less! - and that seemed a better thing for this Australian to be buying. (In fact, they are on the staff at the same university where my sister teaches - not that that is likely to get me any special extra tuition!)

Why not some other one completely, such as Doug's Begining PHP4? Because these were the three I could lay my hands on today, without driving to Melbourme or waiting for a mail order.

So far, I am very happy with PHP and MySQL Web Development.

Mostly tonight, though, I have been learning how to set up a second wiki for testing purposes. All trial and error stuff, but I got it eventually, after a massive battle with SQL not letting me have root access. I now have MediaWiki 1.2.4 still happy as the main install, and 1.3 beta 2 on test.

For my next trick, I have to figure out how to back up and restore MySQL databases, and in particular, how to restore an existing 1.2.4 database to a new 1.3.x install.

But not tonight!
 
For help with MySQL management, you might want to download and try phpMyAdmin. This will allow you to view your MySQL databases through the web. I use it all the time, it's a very handy tool. It will allow you to import and export databases.

However, php is not a great way to backup/restore databases larger than a few MB. PHP has a default execution timeout. If your backup or restore take longer than the default execution timeout, then the script will hault. If you want to modify this parameter, it can be found in the php.ini file under the variable named "max_execution_time".

To backup a MySQL database, run the following via command line from the bin directory. (or if mysql is in the path settings, just run mysqldump)

mysqldump --add-drop-table -u[user_name] -p[password] [database_name] > [file_name(.extension)]



To restore a database:
mysql -u[user_name] -p[password] [database_name] < ./file_name(.extension)]

**Note the direction of the < or > when backing up a database. I always like to think of the symbol as pointer for the direction of the flow of data.

One other caution. The argument "--add-drop-table" applied to the backup will place a statement in the backup file above each table to "drop" each table in a given database with the same name during a restore. If you DO NOT use the "--add-drop-table", AND a table already exists, then the restore will not drop the current table and may halt.

If you're not sure, ALWAYS backup the database prior to restoring just in case the restore goes sour. I prefer to add the "--add-drop-table" argument so that I don't have to worry about dropping each table prior to restoring.

If you would like a script to help automate your backups, I can send you the modified version that Mercutio wrote for me when we started this site. The script does a backup, then compresses the file with the current date and time.
 
Tannin and I won't be around much, if at all, for the next 3 or 4 weeks, because we are heading off to points unknown with camera in hand.

Yippee!

We are taking a laptop, which has a modem, but probably won't be anywhere we can log in from very often.

Be good!

Tea, those words sound familiar.)

(Yes, Tannin. I copied them from last year and the start of the thread.)

(Why?)

(Because we are going again.)

(We are?)
 
I think we're all jealous! :)

Take care! Have fun! Watch out for all kinds of hazards!

And this time, as Buck said, we REALLY want to see some proof.... no pictures of your wonderfull trips!

If not, well start thinking your just enjoying yourself in some place with exotic dancers ;)
 
Thanks RW. Here a a few samples of the wonderful creatures we found.

Red-capped_Robin.jpg


mm1.jpg


WA has fantastic light! Only the centre has better light than outback WA. And WA has some amazing creatures. Not just birds. The insects are fantastic, the flora unbelivable, the geology full of interest, and this little fellow was so cute I wanted to take him home:

Numbat1.jpg
 
The old boy and young Miss Tea have been away from this forum for quite some time. They seem to be online as they've been updating their bird.net.au site - must be super busy and all that jazz.
 
I will be offline starting nowish until May 3rd, when a Comcast henchperson comes to bring me cable, between suckling goat and vestal virgin sacrifice-times. Then I shall have cable, internet and somewhat less soul than I have now.
 
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