Warning, tech talk to follow...

The other day I decided to delve into the unix part of OS X since I have a few more days before I need to be back at work. First thing I did was fix my terminal app to the colors I want and my .tcshrc file to have all the aliases and whatnot I normally have.

Then I figured I'd screw with Apache. Apache comes w/ OS X and starting it up is super easy since it has a control panel. Started that up and started futzing with web stuff. It wasn't long before I asked myself, "how do I run Perl scrips?"

So I went online and found out. It wasn't hard, Perl was already installed! I just had to find the right directory (it's different from Linux). Then I got even more ambitious, what about PHP? Hey, PHP comes with OS X too! But it's not on by default. So I figured out how to change httpd.conf to let me run PHP. I have never used PHP before so this is pretty cool.

I was also going to install mySQL to play with, but decided against it. I figured learning Apache and PHP will be enough for now. That is, if I ever use them. The more I got into the file system of OS X though the more I liked it. I had installed Samba to give me more control over user shares (so Annette could access my photos, etc), and since then I've been wondering what else this thing can do.

The only issue with all this is (as Dave can attest to) it can be a time drain. I had found a cool Perl script to let me admin iTunes over the web, which I figured would be great to let Netter play whatever songs she wanted from her computer. Problem was I had to install a lot of Perl modules, but CPAN didn't like my Perl set up for some reason (kept saying certain files were missing?). After a couple hours I gave up, realizing it was a futile attempt and was draining way too much time out of my day.

Luckly though, most of the stuff I've done was pretty simple. I think I'll stick with what is simple to set up and use from now on. ;)