IT Werkz Sometimes

Thought I’d have a go at hosting a site from one of my home PC’s, just to see how easy or not it is.

For some reason I decided to try on the XP PC and of course that had XP Home on it, which doesn’t have IIS. Don’t know how that got on there as I was pretty sure that my XP disks are all for the Pro version (No doubt some dubious Windows update from Microsoft. Ed). What was even worse was that it had SP3 on XP Home and all of the XP Pro disks I have only include SP2 so there was no way I could do an upgrade from XP Home SP3 to XP Pro SP2. Eventually got the required XP Pro SP3 disk written from an ISO image courtesy of Nero and installed that over XP Home SP3.

All of that took several hours but eventually I was able to install IIS and start that as a service. Tried to load a loopback page and nada. Hmm.. Messed around for a bit with no success so stopped the IIS service and installed XAMPP. That went on easily enough and the Apache service started and I was able to display the loopback page. Generated a ‘Hello World’ PHP page and that was displayed, so that meant PHP was working. Emboldened by that success I saved an already open Word document as a web page, which has an extension of .mht, in the htdocs folder, where Apache looks for pages and that loaded as well.

Tried to create a database with phpMyAdmin and that failed with a horrible error message. Repeated that and got the same error message. I rebooted and had another go at creating a database and this time the critter was created OK. I then started getting another error which I think had something to do with passwords being out of sync. Stuck with that problem right now. Maybe it’s time to RTFM.

When I have sorted that out and have managed to get, or a copy of, the MySQL database that’s behind this blog then I’ll try and host it from home for a couple of days. This version will still be on the hosting site but a copy will be on the XP Pro PC. I think I might have a problem getting a copy of the database from the hosting company as it’s on a different server to where these pages are stored and I’m not convinced I can FTP to it.

Just visited the Windows Update site and Service Pack 3 for Office 2003 is available, 108.2mb in size.

That’s big for Office. I wonder what else is buried in there that they haven’t bothered to tell us about. I can see these kind of updates happening a lot in the future, where you’re told it’s one thing and the software update is actually something else. How are we to know what they deliver to us. I feel I am barely in control of my PC these days.

The update process obviously involves a scan of the software on your PC and sooner or later they will be able to detect valid versions and hacked versions, and no doubt start switching off illegitimate versions. That won’t be fun, though I suppose it will give us the opportunity to make ourselves legit. I always have paid for versions of Windows so I’m not bothered by the checking of that software, but Office, I don’t think I’ve ever had a paid for version of that. I’m sure that’s the case for a lot of other people too, as it’s so darn expensive.

When it’s discovered that we aren’t legitimate users we will no doubt be given a warning and then the opportunity to pay on-line for the software that we want i.e. Word, Excel and Outlook, bye bye Powerpoint, Access and Publisher.

Even if you printed a listing of all the files in the Windows and Office folders, along with their date stamps and file sizes, prior to an update and then compared those date stamps and file seizes with the same files after the update, I’m not sure whether you could really figure out, functionality wise, what has changed. You could see which files had been updated but unless you’re in development on Windows at Microsoft you’re not going to have much of an idea what a lot of these files do.

I feel the country is in shock. Chelsea’s manager, Jose Mourinho, has left the club by mutual consent and everybody’s deep in thought on that.

I got a subwoofer to go with the 42″ TV, Blu-ray player (PS3) and pseudo home cinema with the stereo. As usual I ended up spending more than I wanted to but the sound is great. The subwoofer was made by a Chinese company called Gale, $220.

When I first started playing a DVD the noisy studio logo played, I hadn’t realised how loud the volume levels were set to, I nearly jumped out of my skin. The sound wasn’t a TV sound at all, it was enormous. I then demo’d it with several clips from films and also the Zeppelin DVD – ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ – and also The Who’s Kids Are Alright. It felt as loud as being at a friggin’ concert. 

After 10 minutes of me playing with this rig there was a knock on the front door. Oh no, I’ve already started to annoy the neighbours with my racket. But no, it was somebody collecting for charity. Did I pay him off well.

The Microsoft interview is back on tomorrow. So what happened to the outsourcing to India line?