I got tagged by Kae today. I had actually never herd of the thing before, I just don’t do enough blog reading I guess! Anyway it’s tough to list seven things that people don’t already know. I don’t have much to talk about so don’t be surprised if you know half of these things already!:-)

1. I was sixteen on 19th September > Virgo (What a sign – a fucking  mermaid!). I am still in fifth year at school which i absolutely detest. In fact the only thing that is keeping me in there is the promise of College. From my perspective that is heaven! Parties all the time – and when there are no parties I will be studying for tests by Programming! What more could you want? I should probably mention that I have been in an all Irish school for my whole life and that I talk Irish at home. Native language gotta be done. Oh and just for the record my name, Conor Mac Aoidh is pronounced “Mac í” or “Mac e”.

2. I play the Drums in two bands > The Pot Smokin’ Pirates and The Dominican Affair. Guess which one I enjoy more? I started the drums when I was 13. Before that I played the bodhran (What a load of shite). I went to drum lessons for about a year then I tought myself. When I finished teaching myself I moved on to teaching other people. At the moment I am practicing for the local Panto. I have done it three times before, it is good crac on the night. Gotta hate the music though! The Pot Smokin’ Pirates where the first band I joined, or should I say formed! They were a school band but soon enough I discovered that school and rock music don’t go so well together! We used to practice in the lead singers garage. One day his older brother asked me to join his band ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’. Thats when I really got to grips with the drums – I was playing with a band three years older than me! Eventually ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’ got rid of the lead singer, found a new one and formed The Dominican Affair!

3. I am Oifigeach na hAirgeadais for Ógra Shinn Féin Muineacháin. I don’t want to delve to deeply into this because once you start me I can’t stop! Basically I support and am a member of Sinn Féin. I am in favor of a democratic-socialist, anti-neo-libiralist, egalitarian 32 county united Ireland. Make Partition History! 26 + 6 = 1.

4. Oh what else… I am half Scotish, half Irish and was born in England. I used to collect Warhammer! God I have to include that because it was not a minor thing in my life. For those of you who are familiar with the way it works, I had a 3,000 point Empire Army! That is pretty massive for a ten year old in fairness. The strange thing is that I used them for display. I only ever played a couple of times and found the games to complicated. My main concentration was actually painting the things. I used to paint them like a machine. I also had millions of nobles and all that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have enough points to incorporate them! Come to think of it my first army was High Elves. By the end of my Empire collection I had gotten pretty good at painting the models. Then I started with Bretonians. I had just enough of them to play – two core units and a general. I recently got rid of almost everything in my collection. I kept only a few things. My two best painted pieces – ‘The Green Night’ and a Celtos model which I made a cool base for. Also I have an old White Dwarf from the 80′s signed by the Eavy Metal Team. I might Ebay it! I think that I have enough to make a core unit and general army at the moment!

5. PHP. This tagged thing is directed towards the language users so I had better talk about it. I started learning HTML at the end of 2007 as part of a school transition year course. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then by chance I got work expierence with the local web design company, webworks last summer. That is were i learned CSS and began on PHP. Not to soon after that I got hooked on the language and I love it! I am currently writing Furasta CMS, which will be in beta of it’s first “stable” version by the end of next week, hopefully! I am a linux user and have been since November! I started out with Mandriva One 2009 and then recently moved on to Fedora 10. I think that Linux bears a big role in the future of computers in general.

6. I can fight. With a sword I mean! I trained for Medieval Historical Re-enacting for too many years. I did all the shows where you dress up and people stare at you and ask you if they can look at your sword. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be really. It’s like any other physical sport. You do the same thing over and over and over untill you can do it in your sleep! Then finally once you have done it for a few years you dump the wooden swords and go on to metal! I have to say the proper equipment is pretty cool. It’s quite tough to fight with armour actually because it weighs a ton. I learned how to fight with a sword. shield, staff, pike, bow and arrow and claymore. I haven’t really done anything with it in the last year but there is talk of it starting again so you never know!

7. This is tough… Em… I am an atheist. I believe that believing in God is a completely personal thing and that it should have nothing what-so-ever to do with the state and especially the schools! I don’t have a problem with anyone else that believes in god I just hate the fact that so much trouble has been caused in this world because of religion. I was not baptised and brought up to make my own decision – and I have! It annoys me that my school gets massive “grants” from Catholic Associations and therefore it is a Catholic School. Not only that but the fact that I have to take time out of classes to go to mass four times a year. Basically I think that religion in schools should be eradicated, but the religion class should be kept. I think it is a good idea to discuss religions and to make people aware that there are much more religions out there than Catholicism and that they should make their own decision rather than blindly following the crowd.

Now onto the tagging. I am bound by the rules to tag seven other people. The problem is that I only know one PHP developer and that is the person who tagged me! So for now I will leave this part. But I will update it once I meet other enthusiasts, so I’m not breaking the rules!

Rules

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

I ran into great difficulties getting MySQL to work with the Konsole on Mandriva. I stayed up untill about 5am last night trying to get it to work to no avail. Finally this evening I hit a break through. After trauling through forums last night I found no answers – just millions of people asking the same question so I hope to answer it here!

Method 1

This method is recommended all over the internet and i’m sure it does work – but with a great work around. I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work and I couldn’t so I reverted to method 2 below. I strongly recommend trying method 2 because it simply just works! If anyone can point out what I’m doing wrong here please let me know.

Assuming that you have urpmi installed type the following:

urpmi mysql

Blah Blah Blah and it is installed. Now lets enter mysql.

mysql -u root -p
Enter Password:
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

No! I have got the infamous error 2002! I spent so long trying to fix this error and in the end I estabalished that the mysql.sock file was simply never created. I could go on and list all the solutions that I tried that don’t work but at this point I think the best thing for you to do at this point is to uninstall.

urpme mysql

Good all’s good and now lets revert to method number 2 which actually does work without much trouble.

Method 2

Now this method is easy and will take no longer than five minutes. We are going to install a package called XAMPP which contains Apache 2.2.9, MySQL 5.0.67, PHP 5.2.6 and phpmyadmin among others. It is very usefull. To download just type:

wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xampp/xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz

Then to install:

tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.5.5a.tar.gz -C /opt

It should now be installed – simple as that! To start XAMPP:

/opt/lampp/lampp start
Starting XAMPP 1.5.5a…
LAMPP: Starting Apache…
LAMPP: Starting MySQL…
LAMPP started.

Now that it is started type http://localhost in your browser and there you go!

Now you have XAMPP working which has phpmyadmin which you can use for mysql. If you would rather have MySQL in a CLI (like me) then you can simply follow the instructions below.

MySQL will not work initially because you need to locate the mysql.sock file. To gain immediate access just type:

mysql -u root --socket=/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock

Brilliant its working ! This is only a temporary fix however because you don’t want to have to type in the socket location every time. To set the socket location permenantly to the new location do the following:

vim /etc/my.cnf/

This will open up the documet. Type “i” to get into insertion mode (to edit the text). There are two sections here that you need to edit – client and mysqld. They both have a socket location, if you replace both of those locations with the new one (/opt/lampp/var/mysql/mysql.sock) it should do the job. Press escape to exit insertion mode and press “:wq” to exit and save. Now your MySQL should work by just typing:

mysql -u root -p

Hopefully that works for you, it did for me. As I said earlier I couldn’t find any decent solution online. If you see any problems with what I have written just let me know!

Yeaterday I met a guy browsing the Linux magazines in easons. We started talking about Linux and he highly recomended Mandriva. I had been using Fedora for a month at that stage and to be honest I didn’t think that much of it. The man managed to convince me to buy the Linux Format magazine which included a live version of Mandriva.

When I got home I stuck in the CD, not expecting much since I was disapointed with both Fedora and Ubuntu. Oh My God it is brilliant!! Mandriva is the best operating system that I have ever stumbled upon! Absolutly brilliant! It combines all the good visual aspects of Microsoft’s Window Vista and the good old back end of Linux! The graphical ‘flowing’ widgets and the availability to completly customise everything visually creates a great user friendly (and more importandly Windows user friendly) interface.

So I set about getting rid of Fedora. I only had 12 GB hard drive space reserved for Fedora but I was so impressed by Mandriva that I managed to clear 34 GB for it! The OS is now installed and almost fully functional.

I have to say I am surprised that a Linux distribution has finally achieved what I have been waiting for. The things that I want in Linux are finally available, which are:

• The graphical, ease of use, user friendly aspects of a Windows distribution. Mandriva in my opinion has achieved this, and to my great suprise it has out-done any Windows OS that I have ever used in this section in particular.
• No Viruses. This has allways been available – but without the other points it means nothing.
• The ability to code properly, I have learned the hard way that this isn’t possible on Windows.
• Oh and everything is easy! Like MySQL for example, i found it impossible to set it up on Windows without using PHP MyAdmin.

Over all i think Mandriva is brilliant and I cant wait to get it working properly. The only one problem that I did find with it is that my 02 3G modem won’t work properly on it. I have found some articles to hack the config files, which I intent to do as soon as I find out how to log in as root!!! oh it will all work eventually…

Just to note I got The Strats website up at http://www.thestrats.com please check it out and give me a review here or preferably at http://www.webdesignforum.com/5904-review-my-new-site.html#post22842