All I can say is “urgh.”

Despite my best wishes, Ubuntu has actually trumped both SuSE and WinXP for once. The shock is liable to bring me to my knees and make me contemplate suicide. Seriously. I never thought I would say this but Ubuntu actually has an advantage.

Now, fortunately, it is not a massive advantage. It raises its ugly head when it comes to installing MySQL. (So, not exactly something you do every day!).

With the other operating systems there is a combination of lengthy downloads, messing about with sockets (and in the case of windows ensuring you have working connectors etc), and so on. Based on Ubuntu’s normal difficulty with letting you install things, you would be reasonable to consider this the same.

But no. With Ubuntu the process is:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server (enter)

That is it. Seriously. It works. (Tested just now). I need to go and have a lie down.

Well, with a somewhat embarrased look on my face, I have to provide a follow up to my blog on getting Cold Fusion MX7 running on Linux vs Windows. Sadly, upon booting up the Windows box today this was proven to not be the case.

For some reason, Coldfusion MX 7 has totally embuggerated (is that trademarked word…?) my Apache installation – which completely refuses to run, rendering the Coldfusion installation somewhat pointless (as it wont run without apache). This is starting to degenerate into a farce.

A websearch provided a guide to installing Coldfusion (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/install-coldfusion-mx-windows), granted for version 6.1, which was very detailed and should have been helpfull. Sadly it wasn’t. The instructions here were followed step by step but Apache still gave up the ghost. I have tried default installs of Apache, along with bundled installs (XAMPP etc), and each time it dies on the reboot.

Maybe I was too harsh in my critique of Linux. Maybe it is actually Macromedia’s fault. Needless to say, my interests in developing CF applications is rapidly diminishing…

The Register reported that David Blunkett had given the game away about the true purpooses of ID cards.See  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/15/blunkett_on_id_immigrant_tracking/

The Home Office has been busy denying that the ID card will be used for tracking people. However the former Home Secretary- who was responsible for introducing the mad plan – has shown this claim is as absurd as some of us believe.

Well, loathe though I am to lose the normal linux evangelicalism we like here at “Why Dont You,” but after a nightlong drama at the hands of SuSE10.1, my revolutionary fervour towards Linux is somewhat deflated.

Basically, I spent last night trying to install and configure Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7, under Apache 2.0.54 on SuSE. Should have been easy. On windows it was geniuinely the work of about ten clicks and ten minutes of my life. The linux experience was vastly different.

Overall, after four hours, I still dont have cold fusion up and running on linux. This is madness. It is a server operating system and should find running services like this as easy as displaying a window.

The background. I have a fully running, default, installation of Apache and I downloaded the .bin version of CF MX7 from the Macromedia website. I burned this to disk and got ready to install. As part of the general housekeeping I got rid of all the excess files and ensured there was about 7GB of free space on / (and 1.8GB on /home). All well and good.

Next, the bin file was copied to /tmp so it could be run from the HDD (faster and more reliable than running from CD), and I switched to root to start the install. Install was from the command line in a gnome terminal.

Then everything went down hill. After what seemed an eternity of questions and configuration options, accepting the defaults, everything appeard to be working. I closed the window and tried to connect to local host.

Nothing.

I tried all manner of combinations, different strings and the like. Still nothing. Despite the apache processes running, there is no way on Earth it would let me open localhost. In the end, I cracked, uninstalled ColdFusion and by magic Apache worked again. Sadly, even now, I have no idea what the fault was.

Next time, I paid a bit more attention to the messages and questions. It turns out that SuSE are far from standard in the location of its server binaries and appears (on my system at least) to have three locations for the supposed Apache executable file. SuSE seemed to want to run a file called apache2 (which lives in rc.d), yet despite this identifing it self as “Apache 2.0.54,” ColdFusion refused as it had to be version 2.0.46 or higher. (Madness…) Eventually I found some versions of Apache living under /etc/ calling themselves httpd2. When I pointed CF at these, it was more than happy and the installation went fine.

When all was finished, I edited the required config files (SuSE has its own way of using the httpd.conf file to load modules. It is insane) and tried to start the httpd2 server executable. It appeared like things had worked. YaST wasn’t overly happy and this is not a trivial thing to do. YaST seems to want you to use apache2 and nothing else. Eventually, everything seemed to be running and I braved Cold Fusion.

This is where the problems really started. Numerous error messages scrolled past the console window at light speed. Sometimes making sense, sometimes implying things were working, other times warning of dire problems. In the process of trying to correct the problems I tried to FTP a config file from an different machine, only to discover I had no diskspace remaining on /home.

1.8GB gone in about 3 minutes. Frantically I started deleting files from the Cache and temporary files. Each time, df would report some diskspace returned, only for it to vanish a second later. Nothing I did either found the source of the lost space (piped the output of ls to a file on /root, searched, no large files found) or managed to recover any. A shutdown, followed by a reboot restored a working system (with the 1.8GB /home restored to normal) but ColdFusion was a total non-starter.

This is compared to the effort involved on Windows. Less than a dozen mouse clicks, two passwords and there it was. A working WAMP plus ColdFusion MX 7 system. What is the world coming to…?

A year or more ago, this was on the web to identify a potential security threat in Internet Explorer (but not in Firefox.) http://www.clipboard.googlemyway.com/  The threat was that your clipboard could be read when you visit a web site that has this line of Java code.

I came across the link while clearing out very old emails.  It still works but Internet Explorer does provide some protection now. I have misgivings about how far this is just window dressing. In any case try it and see.

It may not seem that your clipboard represents much of a security threat, unless you are unlucky enough to visit a site with such code when you have recently copied your credit card PIN in for another purpose.

However, today, just after transferring a huge number of Ms-Access records  to Excel and getting the “do you want to save the clipboard?” message , I realised that the clipboard often holds data that shouldn’t be available for general distribution. The records that might be held in the clipboard by a bank or a hospital could possibly harm someone. It’s not a completely trivial flaw.

Also, I’ve added the new tags to the past month’s posts, more or less.

This is a one-liner to let our readers know we have added a few more categories.