My plans for the upcoming winter break will be primarily concerned with designing a new Content Management System(CMS) for a local youth group in Cairns. I created the initial design for the webpage back in November 2004. I was given one weeks notice to create a respectable, neat and informative web presence for the group. I came up with a very static, HTML only, set of pages that briefly described what the group was about.

With the onset of the christmas holidays i was keen to teach myself some more about good web design. So i set up my own FreeBSD Server, and put myself online.

I chose demon(.homeunix.net) because it was debated on a video of an american geek show as to how you say the name of the furry FreeBSD devil mascot.

Is it “demon” or “daemon”. Well daemon.homeunix.net was already take at the DNS name registar so “demon” would have to suffice. And daemon is too hard to spell.

I installed PHP and MySQL on the server, and went about teaching myself some PHP web design. The typical “Hello World” and phpinfo() pages were created, and i slowly moved onto database insertion and deletion.

I must stop at this point to say that during this time an invaluable tool was phpMyAdmin.

I then took a rather large step, and decided to design my own “phpBB style” messaging system. I got the functionality of pages working, but it just needed more on the aesthetic side to make it even vaguely useful. Plus, the whole system consisted of 3 files which were riddled with copied and pasted code. By immersing myself in a considerable amount of new topics it forced me to assume certain things before i had learnt about them properly, each and individually. One of my main assumptions was that there was still quite a considerable amount of staticness(if thats even a word) in PHP. This was because i assumed that there were no facilities for implementing functions or classes or different data types.

I soon ironed these misconceptions out, when i read through the source code for Mambo - a popular Web Content Management System. I realised that there were such things as classes and functions and the way that i was accessing the MySQL database before wasn’t just a bizarre collection of steps that needed to be followed to access the database.

[January, 2005]

I spent about a week customising Mambo and even offered to help redesign the new www.fnqgl.com website. Although i didn’t follow through on this, as i had heaps more to learn about FreeBSD in the remainder of my holidays. At this stage, i was running my web server on a Pentium 3 500, and although this was doing a good job at serving web pages, it was taking hours and hours to compile the Java SDK/JDK (1.4). It was just plain slow in my opinion. So i went out and bought myself a whole new system to run my webserver. That being:

• AMD Sempron 2500+(shaddup andrew!)
• 512Mb DDR-400 RAM
• Asus Mobo. I had a few spare hard drives hanging around, and my brother had just bought a new 120Gb SATA drive that wouldn’t plug into his P3 800 Mobo with only IDE ports. So instead of taking it back, I convinced him of the prospect of having our own home server, and so he gave me the SATA drive and he went and bought another drive(this time IDE ).

I installed FreeBSD 5.3 on this new system, as this is what i had on the old system, and i had knowledge and experience of FBSD5.3 working, without any noticable bugs.

[May 2005]

In Early May 2005 I joined the FreeBSD Java Mailing List. This was an opportunity for me to fill my mailbox with useless(although perhaps educational) mail. Well it is better than spam! Around this time I started to play around with the recent Alpha version of Suns JDK/SDK 1.5. FreeBSDs native java1.5 implementation was very buggy, to the point of it being still in the process of it being ported over. So i opted for the Sun-Linux version of the JDK. After installing Java1.4 first(it’s a prerequisite) I finally got the 1.5 working. The main reason for installing jdk1.5 is so that i could run netbeans 4.0 on the system, for my JCU CP3120 project. This is where i hit a brickwall(although somewhat soft and squiggy…and only knee-high). I have had no success with updating my portage tree in FreeBSD so far…Wait…let me correct that..

I haven’t sat down for long enough to learn how to update my portage tree in FreeBSD.

I swear, it is as easy as adding/modifying a few lines in a simple config file. But, i must be too lazy. All this work with Unix and PHP and MySQL has payed off for me this semester. The first assignment in my CP2377:Portable Programming class was a Shell Script Assignment. I have to thank Nick for his initial help with learning Linux for my success in that assignment. The second assignment was to create a PHP page for extracting timetable information from a CELCAT generated HTML page. I can attribute my initial interest in PHP to my foundation understanding of this assignment. Although, as this assignment relied heavily on string manipulation andI was relatively new to regular expressions, I didn’t do as well as i would have liked.

Moving closer to the present time, I have finished all my exams

I have left alot of my social life unwritten, partly because there is a severe lack thereof, when you are infatuated with learning new things about computers(i.e - a nerd). And partly because it would make other nerds jealous, the fun times that i did have. (i.e - birthday party with real girls and that highly intoxicating drinking game i learnt on the night NSW beat QLD in the state of origin)

I had intended this to be a whole heap longer than what it is, but i started to get bored about 10 lines in.