It’s Good to Have Talents
I deviate from my usual technobabbling to reflect on some of the things that have happened in the last couple of days. I designed a website for the Southwest High Robotics Team, the launch of which I announced earlier this month, and now the team captain would like me to be the Media Captain, in addition to my current position of Website Captain. This would mean that I would not only maintain the site, update the upcoming photo galleries and video pages, and develop new features like our planned wiki, but would also take photos and possibly create posters/edit videos. My skills in the latter two I'm not so sure of, but I have gotten quite a few positive remarks about my picture-taking abilities. I don't know how much of it is skill and how much is luck, but I'll take whatever compliments I get.
It would definitely make adding new photo galleries easier, not having to get burned CDs from the current photographer, and actually kind of knowing what's going on so I can organize the albums on my own. It could mean I'd have to delegate some of the more mundane tasks, like filling in album tables with values, to others (who have offered to help). I might turn into a regular executive-type who never does anything himself. OK, so that's a stretch, but I seriously could find some excuses to delegate tedious tasks. Let's see... Resizing images, filling in HTML templates, adding links, updating website text... The list could potentially go on for a while. Depending on what taking the position would involve, perhaps I will take on the extra challenge, if only to exercise my management and photography skills.
MediaWiki Developers are Quick
I submitted a MediaWiki bug this morning (bug 11438) and it was patched in SVN under 30 minutes later. That's just, wow. Of course, I have to either patch my current local installation or download a new SVN version (which might have unknown issues that will be fixed before the next release), but by hook or by crook it'll be fixed in the next release. Special thanks to Niklas Laxström for the quick fix!
A few details: I was trying out a new extension I installed that generates trees from lists and has expandable/collapsible nodes using JavaScript, and tried using it with the experimental Live Preview function in MediaWiki. I noticed the tree was getting cut off, so I reported a bug to the extension's developer on the extension's talk page at MediaWiki.org. After going back and forth for a few days, testing various issues, I finally decided it wasn't his problem, given the test results both of us were getting. I thanked him for his tests and tried something in my wiki (namely pasting a long article from Wikipedia, and then also trying to preview 50 paragraphs of "Lorem ipsum" text), noting that these were also cut off. I reported the bug to Bugzilla and it was patched just like that.
Whoops, gotta run; I have a message from Bugzilla that probably has patching instructions...
PHP Upgrade, Painstakingly
I upgraded PHP from version 5.2.1 to 5.2.2 last week, and boy did it take elbow grease. I had to fart around in the login settings on my computer, since I installed PHP under a different account that was no longer available on the Welcome Screen. I hate Windows. For some reason, I could only see my PHP installation from the account it was installed under. I had to log in two accounts and make sure my install settings were the same. That was weird, but at least it didn't break. Now I have two PHP INSTALLER EDITS - REMOVE ONLY ON UNINSTALL sections in my httpd.conf file. One's commented out; does that mean I can get rid of it?
When's Apache getting an upgrade? I've been stuck with version 2.2.4 for a long time now...
MySQL Upgrade, with a Small Issue
I upgraded MySQL on my computer a week or two ago, and had an almost flawless install. The only problem was I had to go back to the old my.ini. No biggie; just rename the files. But boy did it make my heart race when I saw there was a problem. I store all my homework (well, almost all) in a MediaWiki installation, run by the MySQL server instance I was upgrading. When I saw all the errors caused by the new configuration file, I thought I would lose all my stuff. Good thing I found a fix. I wish I knew what went wrong...
MediaWiki Upgrade, but One Thing Didn’t Work
I upgraded MediaWiki from 1.9.3 to 1.10.0 on May 10. I like the new features. Only problem: page restrictions were moved from a column in the page table to a separate table in the upgrade. The upgrade script, though this will be fixed in a later release, made `wikidb.page_restrictions.pr_expiry` equal to NULL instead of "infinity". Problem? Shouldn't be ordinarily, but Special:Protectedpages didn't work; the entries from pre-1.10.0 didn't display. I just changed them all manually using phpMyAdmin, but it's fortunate I have a small wiki. Maybe I should learn SQL to cope with possible future errors...
Installing MediaWiki: The Trials and Tribulations
Over the past couple of days, I have been trying to install and configure all the required programs for MediaWiki. That includes Apache server, PHP 5.x.x, and MySQL 4+. I got Apache 2.2.4 and PHP 5.2.1 installed and running; I made sure by copying some PHP files from one of my websites to Apache's htdocs directory and going to http://localhost/cada/, which if the server was working would display the files I had just copied. (I configured Apache to just show up as localhost, to the best of my knowledge.) The index.php file showed up just like it would over the Internet. First milestone.
I then (foolishly) tried to run MediaWiki 1.8.2, and the setup script (obviously) gave me an error, since MySQL was not yet present. I installed it and waded through its configuration wizard as best I could. Then I tried again with MediaWiki's setup script. It complained again, saying that PHP didn't have database drivers. I installed both the mysql and mysqli extensions, just to be safe. Then I tried the script once more. Success! It said, "Environment checked, you can install MediaWiki!" Yes!
I filled in all my info, including the root user for MySQL, and hit the install button. MediaWiki came back with a truncated result page. After a couple more failures I eventually decided to create a user for MediaWiki manually through phpMyAdmin, which I had stored along with MediaWiki (I don't remember if I also created the database manually). Once I did that, I went back to the setup script and entered the user info and left the root blank. I made it to the next stage: bad SQL files.
Somehow, the SQL files included with MediaWiki 1.8.2 had a plethora of errors, which I tried and failed to correct (I don't know SQL), clearing the tables from the database before each successive test to prevent errors. (MediaWiki can deal with an empty database and a pre-existing one, but I found that partial wikidbs can cause hiccups.) The first errors were pretty simple to fix -- they involved just removing "DEFAULT" statements -- but then I ran into a cryptic error, something involving "sub-strings," and couldn't continue fixing things (the MySQL engine would stop at the first error). I had to give up temporarily, but I vowed to get the newest MediaWiki version the next time I got Internet access.
It turned out I was several versions behind. MediaWiki 1.8.2 was long gone, replaced by version 1.9.3. I downloaded and unpacked the new version, then copied it to my htdocs folder (under a different subdirectory, so as not to overwrite my old version). I gave the setup script in the new version the same information, clicked the install button, and was quickly congratulated by MediaWiki, which gave me instructions to move the configuration file to the main directory. I did so and then clicked the link to "your wiki".
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