Dreamweaver, Ubuntu PHP and MySQL

First, let me remind you that I’m not an expert at Ubuntu, so the following is again, the result of a couple of buckets of sweat !

Have been fiddling around with PHP and MySQL for a while — didn’t work out at first.

then I found why I couldn’t get them to work properly…

1) MySQL is setup in such a way, you cannot connect to it from the outside.

solution : change the my.cnf file (on my system, it was located in /etc/mysql/)

find a line that says “skip-networking” (without the quotes) and put a # in front of it.
there, now you can connect to MySQL from a graphical shell like MySQL Administrator on a Windows machine ;-) of course, MySqlCC on Linux is just as good.

2) PHP is set up to ignore MySQL completely

solution : un comment two lines in php.ini (on my system it was located in /etc/php4/apache2/) watch out though … they give some sample lines, but one of them has
a spelling mistake in it… it should be extension=mysql.so and extension=gd.so for some reason, one of those lines is written msql.so.

3) rights have to be set correctly

I used these pages as a reference : sourceforge and my favorite dev.mysql.com

4) Dreamweaver functions have to be installed on the server to be able to test your connection

somewhere on your windows computer, you should be able to find a folder called _mmServerScripts. This folder needs to be copied into the folder where your PHP application will be created (I don’t remember if DWMX2004 did it automatically — but I remember copying it manually).

Some useful commands :

to restart mysql (you need to restart it when adding or changing userrights)
sudo killall mysqld  (to stop it)
sudo mysqld start (to start it)

when changing ini files and conf files you need to restart apache … without restarting linux, this is done with :
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

 

 

 

The movie copi�r

I buy a lot of movies. For years, I bought tons of VCR cassettes. Being a real collector, I watched them each over a dozen times over. And then disaster struck. My VCR would destroy a video when you watched it and during the time you were watching pressed rewind. I do that all the time — missed something, so a quick rewind to rehear what that person was saying. of course — you don’t know the video was destroyed until you watch it a second time.

I found myself in the DVD Era pretty soon after that hideous mishap.

In the mean time, my DVD collection is growing — I buy a lot of DVD’s. And again, as before, I watch them regularly. I salvaged some of my VCR’s as DIVX some time ago, but I never got round to putting them on a DVD — so I was happy to find that it is quite easy to do. I found the procedure to convert DIVX into DVD on Afterdawn. (You will need a powerful machine — and a lot of time to get the job done though)

After the mishap with my VCR collection, I have grown somewhat paranoid.. So for the moment I’m creating backup DVD’s of some of my most loved DVD’s… I didn’t know copying a DVD was so simple.

For those who want to know :

download two software packages :

DVDdecryptor : which reads and writes DVD’s (free)
DVDShrink : which allows you to throw away the things you don’t need (subtitles and audio in albanian or Arabic or any other language you don’t understand) (free)

First use DVD decryptor in “File” Mode to get all of the files from the DVD decrypted and zone removed onto the HD. Next use DVD Shrink to backup or reauthor the files on your disk … last, write the ISO file which is the result of DVD Shrink back to a DVD… using DVD decryptor in Write ISO mode…

easy as 123