Gareth Simpson

A long time ago I asked the LazyWeb for a place to ask open questions of the world.Much later, I started playing with MediaWiki, the software that powers WikiPediaNow with glacial speed these two things have coalesced as AnswerMeThis, a kind of Google Answers meets LazyWeb.Will it work or is it just a symptom of me having a shiny new Wiki hammer and looking for some nails to hit?Obviously I can’t say but if it could just answer me these twoquestions then it won’t have been a total waste of time.

I’ve been playing with MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. MediaWiki is in PHP and classic LAMP fodder so I had assumed that it was going to be something of a trial, given that I have no Linux box at home to test things on. But of course my little ancient iMac is running OS X and while I’ve always been aware that it’s Unix based in a kind of abstract way, I’ve finally had a demonstration of what that means in practice.The MySQL installer of OS X is laughably simple, really, it’s not even worth talking about.Getting PHP to run on Panther is also simple if you know what you’re doing. Google (at least the searches I was running) talks about downloading this, and compiling that. In the end a little poking about revealed the following (repeated here for future googling): All you have to do to make PHP work in panther is edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and uncomment the linesLoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.soand AddModule mod_php4.cI was stunned. No fuss, no muss.sudo …