Saturday Night Geek Lessons

Ok, having some minor issues hacking my name badge for LCA2012... AND NO THAT IS NOT A REQUEST FOR HINTS OR THE ANSWER!!!  

I have a few more months to geek up enough to accomplish that right?  I'm well on my way, already found the clues and the bits and pieces, just need to work out all the checksums and salt business.  I'm happy with where I am since I never expecting to get even this far.  I have definitely come to a point where I'm struggling had have various ideas of where to go and what to do next.  I chatted to O.G about some of these ideas and received minute amounts of direction and plenty of confirmation.  I'm sure once I get a few more blocks of free time I'll progress in leaps and bounds :-P

For me, this weekend was supposed to be all about Uncharted 3 (PS3).  I had been looking forward to playing this game for ooooh a good 6 months!  Silly me got the release dates confused, I honestly thought that it came out the same day as Skyrim 11/11/11.  But nooooooooo it was released 01/11/11 talk about massive #girlfail

Of course I was totally unorganised, the sale on Uncharted 3 I'd had my eye on (obviously not closely enough) ended on the 09/11/11, so after scoping the internet for a new deal, rude staff and store hoping I managed to get my grubby little hands on a copy at about 22:30... not such a great start to a new game on a Saturday night!

Arriving at the "classroom" ~23:00, I totally wasn't in gamer mode, instead laptops were turned on and noses were sunk into all manners of geekiness.  The original plan of gaming quickly morphed into "I must install Drupal 7.7 and all associated goodies (MySQL & PHP & fave modules etc) on Ubuntu".  Tangent much?

UBUNTU 11.04 WHY YOU NO HAVE DRUPAL 7???

The previous week much time was spent Googling and reading all manner of tutorials, instructions and how to's regarding the matter.  For some reason when it comes to Linux related toys I tend to do a lot of research before diving head first into the deep end, good habit I've started.  

Being ~23:30 and laziness was setting in I asked O.G what "tasksel" was as it was mentioned in one of the tutorials, there was much scoffing and disapproval but I managed to immediately drag his attention from whatever it was he was doing.

He asked why I didn't just "apt-get drupal" - my only response was "shit I can do that?" #facepalm.  After doing a search for Drupal which yelded no Drupal 7 packages the ninja took over.  This wasn't exactly my intention, and resulted in me getting my nose out of joint.  I wanted to do this myself damn it!!! **stompyfoot**

After a momentary sulk and noticing how much text was rolling down my screen and the rapidity of his fingers dancing across the keys, I cottoned on, this wasn't going to be as straight forward an installation as I'd hoped.  YAY more learnings!

Intently watching the ninja at work and my obvious inability to keep up, I asked something along the lines of why his search results were showing up coloured.  So began the revisit into grep.  We'd only ever so lightly touched on it, I had run commands in the past that incorporated grep but I hadn't reeeeeally worked out what it was, my focus was on the lesson at hand.

I now "get" grep, such a useful little tool.  I can't wait for my regex knowledge to increase then I can really unlock TEH POWA!  

So... Drupal 7 you say?  HA!  I wanted to replicate the environment that my website is currently running on, which is Drupal 7.7.  The simple solution?  Well obviously there isn't one, no apt-get installers and no backporting.  This is going to be a job for, next weekend me thinks.

Geeking between 01:00-03:00 not exactly smart, my retention drops considerably by then but whatever.  There was some editing of the apt-get sources and attempts at backporting, still no love D7 love.

There was a tangent or 3, playing with pushd - zomg THAT is going to come in VERY handy me thinks!!!

Finally there was a lesson in file hierarchy.  Since I mentioned I was too scared to install anything outside of apt-get because I didn't know where all the files were supposed to go or how they work.  NO C:\ WHAT I DOOOOO?  

I like that I seem to ask all the right questions and cotton on pretty quick, I have somewhat of a knack or at least a definite interest in understanding all of the mechanics behind... EVERYTHING!  This is a totally new experience for me, not the sense of wanting to know all the ins and outs of things, just wanting to understand HOW things work behind the scenes... What can I say - I was a Windows girl.  CLICK CLICK OOOOH IT WORKS... mostly.  Hey, why my computer go chug chug?  REBOOT!

I'm not learning this stuff in an attempt to generate revenue, I'm not attempting to "get it" so that I don't feel excluded from conversations, I am actually learning this for me because I genuinely want to know for ME!

02:30-03:00 saw Aussie Hip Hop on Rage and some well earned SLEEP!