George Edwards

False alarm, no Grand Theft Auto yet. Fingers crossed, it’ll be here on Tuesday!

Well amidst sweating blood to get my finance report on HMV Group (funnily enough) for Uni out of the way, I’ve had a couple of interesting emails about my Grand Theft Auto IV pre-order!

The first one, to tell me my pre-order will be shipped via Special Delivery:

The second, to tell me today that they’ve shipped my order:

Ok, so does this mean I get it tomorrow? Dazed and confused, I logged in to check:

Bit weird, I suppose only time will tell! I’ll be at the reception in the morning though to see if the rumour is true!

I use a nifty piece of software on my Mac called XAMPP, which flawlessly installs an entire PHP and MySQL (along with other features) development environment.

Of course, Mac OS comes bundled with Apache and there’s a lot of info on the Internet to help you configure the factory installed Apache with PHP and MySQL. That said, it’s much easier just to get a whole package that does it for you.

Not convinced? Take a look. You can even get it for Windows, although from experience I find WAMP does the job perfectly.

The most alluring feature of Apache is the ability to configure multiple hosts on one single machine. Professional web hosting companies use the same technique I will demonstrate here in order to host several websites on one physical node, whilst maintaining individuality for the hosted sites. It’s a little thing called “virtual hosts” and it’s something I couldn’t live without.

Let me give you a small example. I currently have four virtual hosts configured on my MacBook. This means that when I open my browser and navigate to “http://ge”, I’m forwarded to a local copy of this site for development purposes. I also have another - “http://xampp” which is a site for accessing the XAMPP administration page and a further two. You see the point. Whilst all DNS names point back to localhost, Apache sends each one to a seperate virtual directory containing a different site.

Configuring hosts
Before doing anything, you need to set up your hosts file. On a Mac, it’s easy to find, in /etc/hosts. I won’t cover doing that here, there are plenty of sites around the Internet to help you. If you’re a grizzled networking veteran you’ll know that hosts is a local file used for DNS resolution.

Specifying the virtual hosts
The thing I noticed with XAMPP is that the build of Apache it installs doesn’t like the standard virtual hosts configuration you specify with WAMP and other builds. In fact, it took me a good few days to find the technique in order to actually get it up and running properly. You should know where your virtual hosts are specified. In the standard httpd.conf file, Apache includes a file seperately for easy management of virtual hosts. You’ll need to un-comment this line:

# Virtual hosts
Include /Applications/xampp/etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

On boot-up, XAMPP now knows to look in the extra directory for a file called httpd-vhosts.conf. Sure enough, with the original name of “vhosts”, this is where you specify your virtual hosts configuration.

This is the bit I found tough - the syntax to use. Luckily for you, all you have to do is copy what I write and fill in the blanks with your bits:

Quite obviously, you’ll see you will need to create a site directory within the htdocs directory to hold your site. Next, you should have noticed the ServerName and ServerAlias conditions. This bit - specified as “ge” for the purpose of this guide - should be the name of your local server that you’ve already configured to point back to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.

There isn’t much else to write on this topic. Obviously, it goes without mention, before expecting any changes to take effect you’ll need to restart your XAMPP installation.

If you have any problems, leave me a comment and I can help you out. Good luck and happy developing!

A quick bit of thinking in this blog entry. I was just reading through a BBC News article here, about the chances of extra-terrestrial intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe.

To summarise the article, a guy called Professor Watson at the University of East Anglia claims that the chance of intelligent life existing on an “Earth like planet” elsewhere in the Universe is something like 0.01%. He goes on to claim that humans went through “four critical stages” in evolution to become an intelligent life-form.

However, here’s my take on the subject. Professor Watson says two slightly controversial/questionable things here:

1. “Earth like planet”
2. “Four critical stages of evolution”

It seems to me that all of these highly intelligent scientists, astrologists, astronomists, evolutionists and other “ists” seem to be certain that life can only exist on a planet that possesses all of the characteristics of Earth - such as liquid water, same amount of gravity, temperature, climate, resources and so on. Has anyone considered that maybe not all forms of intelligent life needs this “recipe” for evolution? Perhaps out there somewhere in some far reaches of The Milky Way we have this intelligent alien that doesn’t need water to survive and doesn’t need a perfect climate to avoid getting a pretty nasty sun tan.

Can you see where I’m coming from here? I’m not a scientist and I may be completely missing the point here but maybe these assumptions made by boffins behind a telescope all over the globe are slightly off. These “recipes for life” that the boffins claim must be identical to that on Earth are all good theories if you want intelligent humans elsewhere in space; but with so many galaxies, stars and planets beyond our Solar System, there could be a planet full of “aliens” with American accents. But the chances are there are probably some pretty weird and wonderful species out there too.

Maybe E.T. is out there now, reading this, on a “computer” that’s withstanding a gravitational pull 500 times that of Earth’s, with a nice cold glass of hydrochloric acid and some helium isotope for dinner.

And for week four (yes late again I know), it’ll be Yellowcard - Light Up The Sky. Most of the songs off this album are great though.

Sorry, I just had to share this with everyone. I thought it was hilarious!

Slightly late this time, but there’s two to compensate.

This week it’s a song off the Madden 2008 soundtrack, From Autumn To Ashes - Daylight Slaving.

And Guano Apes - Open Your Eyes.