In the summer of 2009 I revisited my 2004 summer apprenticeship at Object Mentor. What follows is the original 2004 post and then some 2009 commentary.

So I downloaded and installed Apache – which wasn’t too much trouble. But MySQL was a different story. When typing in the bizarre list of commands to install it, I made a slight typo which took a little while to track down. But, even worse, I ran into the same problem as before – MySQL would run but Word Press couldn’t find it. After a lot of messing about I finally figured out that Linux had installed MySQL automatically and that was causing conflicts. Which I couldn’t figure out how to resolve. Before I installed PHP I decided to look and see if it was on the hard drive. I found the documentation, and when I typed in PHP at the command line something happened. But I couldn’t find where the files where installed. If this were windows I would have some idea how to go about looking for things. Add/Remove programs can tell you what’s installed. The find function in Linux doesn’t seem to work as well as windows. This is all part of the big problem here: I don’t know Linux yet and so all my usual tricks do not apply. Thursday ended with Word Press’ ‘five minute install’ as yet to be completed. It’ll have to wait ‘till Monday because tomorrow I’m heading downtown to get a passport. In theory, you only need a birth certificate and a driver’s license to travel to Canada, but I have these visions of my flight taking off as I try to convince some large man that I really am a U.S. citizen. Best to be sure.

Turns out most Linux installs come with Apache, PHP, and MySQL – this supporting of common developer tools was weird to me coming from Windows where if it’s remotely useful it must have a heinous install and cost a lot of money.

Why was I going to Canada? Because that year’s XPAU (Extreme Programing Agile Universe (Now just called Agile as in ‘Agile 2009’ - have I mentioned that I’m speaking at it?)) was in Calgary that year. Object Mentor used to organize XPAU, so it was a pretty big deal for them. And me. I think this might have been the last year Object Mentor was running the show.