Computer Books are worthless



This week I almost reached the end - you know that breaking point we all have were you stop trying to solve your problem and you begin to look for a long barreled weapon and a tall building? Yup, I was there. And what was it that once again took me to the brink of self-destruction? A computer book of course!

I keep falling into the same trap. I read reviews on these damn books and I find one that all the reviews look good. Everyone raves about how great the thing is. I run out, purchase it and at first glance it looks absolutely terrific. I begin to pour over the pages. Typically they have nice graphs, and pictures of what everything is suppose to look like and the author drones on (much like I am doing here) about how well everything works in this latest release of Foo by Bar inc.

Then some time goes by and I actually need some specific information from the book. I have come across (or often as is the case for me, created) a situation where a question must be answered. A task must be completed - and yes it must be completed in a given amount of time. Now, I will be the first one to say that the time is typically self-imposed. And, all too often that time is the last 30 minutes I have to actually do the task. I mean, really, if I have a week to complete something why waste the first 6 days 23 hours and 30 minutes of my precious week with trivial stuff?

And so was the situation in my latest experience.

I have to say that all in all - despite a few path stumbling - I love my Macs. I love them so much that I converted my wife to Mac and am in the process of eliminating all my Windows machines. But, then again there is an insanity to Windows that, in many cases, I understand. I don't know why but I do. My windows website was pretty easy to set up (for example). I know - everyone has a website. But, how many of you are actually running a sizable MySQL database with PHP through a 3d party web-server on a T1? And, uhm, not at your business - out of your house. Well, I am. As a matter of fact I run a couple web sites.

So here I am - the weekend coming to a close and my beautiful bride wants me to migrate one of the websites off to my Mac server. No problem. I have read the book, I know how to do this. It's simple. Just open the dialog, click a button here, fill in a checkbox there and viola!

And so it went. Not a single hitch. That is - up until we actually tried to publish content to the damn thing. You see it seems we didn't have enough access privileges. Funny - I though ROOT pretty much said it all. Guess not. So after hours of fumbling with webDAV and all other sundry of technologies which are supposed to make life easier (but don't) I was sitting with a book and a Mac server in front of me trying to wonder exactly what one must do to publish a God damn web-page on a God damn Mac. The more I delved into the 5 or 6 pages the book had on web-publishing with your Mac server, the more I wondered if the author had even seen a copy of Mac OS X 10.3 or if he just happened to have a bunch of screen grabs that he placed text around then charged me $40 for at the local BnN. I spun through other areas of the book and began more and more to believe that this was the case. Page after page of examples that I just could not get to function as described.

Then it dawned on me. Not only must you be root (or admin) but you apparently have to publish from the actual machine which serves the pages. Something that would have made a nice aside on any one of those few pages on web publishing in this damn useless tome. So, I drafted a minor page and up it went.

Well - that won't do at all. What's the point of being networked?

Ok - I can fix this. I just created a shared drive, mounted it, gave permissions to the proper accounts, reset the values for the web-server to point to the right place - and viola! There were my pages. Only, I couldn't publish there either.

After days of yelling obscenities at both the book, and the machine - and asserting that the parents of the author of the book were not married - I finally got it. I have a drive partition to which both my wife and I can publish web pages. Well, as long as we don't want any of our CGI's to work anyway.

So, I have given up for now. Putting this task off until another day when I have more time to vent, threaten, and otherwise show how completely ignorant of the task at hand I truly am. Now, I do bring up one obvious possibility that I dare not yet broach until I have time to fully consider it. It brings me full circle to the beginning of today's blog and to a statement that my brother (another convert) often says. Perhaps, I'm looking too hard. Perhaps it's just that the Mac approach is simply too simple for my 20 year Windows indoctrinated brain to comprehend. Perhaps after having left it alone for a few days I will figure it out.

Or, perhaps I will break out that shotgun and put two slugs right down the middle of another useless computer book.

Posted: Tue - September 20, 2005 at 07:04 PM   If this blog entry was of use to you, why not show your appreciation by donating to support the site? Just click on the MAKE A DONATION button on the right hand side of the page! It's all handled by PAYPAL.
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