James Skemp's StrivingLife

I just saw An Inconvenient Truth this afternoon.  If you've any desire to see it, see it.  If you're concerned about the environment, see it.  If you care about (extended) family members younger than yourself, see it.

What bothers me is that now that I've seen the movie, I want to donate - I want to write, etcetera - but where's the call to action?  Turns out it's at www.climatecrisis.net

By filling out just a couple of forms, you can send a message to your representatives.

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One comment on the movie: I would have liked to have seen the graphs once again at the end of the movie, during the credit crawl.  After an hour and a half plus, we're likely to forget some of those graphs.  Alternatively, the slideshow presentation available online (in Flash format, for example) would also be great.  Even if people aren't willing to sit through a movie, they may be willing to watch a short slideshow ...

There's a great little guide over at webmonkey that discusses how to build your own Firefox extension.

http://webmonkey.com/webmonkey/06/25/index3a.html?tw=programming

There's also two other guides that the above points to. One at Born Geek, and another at XUL Planet.

In a previous post, we installed phpMyAdmin 2.7.0-pl2 to our local Web server. We did this so that we would have an easy way to administer our MySQL databases, from a PHP-based interface. This time, we'll be upgrading phpMyAdmin to version 2.8.1.

Downloading and unzipping

First, we'll need to grab the download for phpMyAdmin, from http://www.phpmyadmin.net/. As of this writing, the current version is 2.8.1. The zip file runs about 3.5 MB.

Once the download has finished, we can unzip the file into our main Web directory (C:\home). Depending upon how you installed the previous version of phpMyAdmin, you can either keep this new version in a folder containing the version number, or not. For example: c:\home\phpMyAdmin-2.8.1\ or c:\home\phpMyAdmin\ If you'll be doing things the latter way, make sure you make a backup of your previously installed phpMyAdmin directory - just in case. If you'll be saving to a directory containing the version information, then there's no real reason to remove the old directory (unless you're concerned with space).

Configuring phpMyAdmin

At this point you can go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin-2.8.1/ However, if you do so, you'll notice that you're unable to view the interface due to an error. As with our initial install, we need to configure phpMyAdmin before we can start using it.

Browse to the directory containing your previous installation of phpMyAdmin (for example, C:\home\phpMyAdmin-2.7.0-pl2\) and copy the file config.inc.php. Now, make a copy of this file in your upgraded phpMyAdmin's directory - C:\home\phpMyAdmin-2.8.1\config.inc.php, for example.

Open this file and verify that $cfg['PmaAbsoluteUri'] (on line 31) is correct. If you've switched from one directory scheme to another (with version number to without, or vice versa), then this may not be correct.

You should now be able to refresh, or visit, http://localhost/phpmyadmin-2.8.1/ and log in, using one of the MySQL user names and passwords you've setup.

Finally, if you setup a subdomain in your httpd.conf file (C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache\conf\), you can modify the subdomain so that it points to the correct path. If you make this change, make sure you restart Apache afterwards.

And with that, you've successfully updated phpMyAdmin. Really, a pretty easy upgrade.

View all of the steps to creating a local Web server, for development.