Progress

I've had a project in mind for probably more than a year now. It involves programmatically scraping web pages for information and then saving that information to a database. I decided to use Python as the programming language, and MySQL as the database. Somewhere along the line I also decided to create a web front end, so Apache is also involved. I'd written some Python code a couple of months ago, then downloaded MySQL a month ago. Today I spent some time trying to get the pieces to work together and I had some modest success. I'm happy with that.

Cakewalk

I installed Cakewalk on my Vista partition last week. This evening I spent some time trying to make some music. Things went well after I found the manual that came with the software. Good thing I didn't throw that away! I wouldn't have been able to do anything without it. Searching for answers online can be helpful, but a well-crafted paper reference will trump it every time. I did go searching for one thing online though--how to play MIDI audio through regular computer output rather than through MIDI. I found that answer here at the techguy forums.

Plugging a computer in to a keyboard is something I always dreamed about as a kid, but actually making something that passes as music still takes some considerable time, and a composer I am not. Unfortunately, it seems that trying to do this stuff in Linux is a bridge too far. There are very few MIDI programs, and even fewer MIDI interfaces for Linux. That's another thing that I have to keep Windows around for. I'm not really much of a gamer, but I still like to play pinball from time to time.

Path to python in Apache

One of my side projects has been developing a MySQL database that gets fed data from the web using Python, with a web front end. Since Python is feeding MySQL, I figured I'd use it as the server-side scripting language too, but from the beginning I've had problems. I kept coming up with the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error. After I'd restarted Apache all was well. I'd seen that in the httpd-error.log the error was 'Premature end of script headers', but for some reason today I noticed that wasn't the only error. The previous error always comes with "env: python: No such file or directory". That gives me something to go on. So it seems that Apache doesn't know the path to python. I saw something somewhere on the web about the path not being complete when apache was started, but I didn't see a fix--maybe just complete the path before starting Apache, eh? Anyway, I don't feel like running this to ground tonight--I'm bushed.

CUPS progress

An event worth blogging about. I scored another victory in my struggle against my FreeBSD machine. I'd gotten CUPS working, but I still had two major problems. On the web interface, all the buttons that control my printer were broken, because the links had started http://::1 instead of http://localhost. After a significant amount of time, I learned that this is ipv6 notation, and if I understand correctly, incorrect ipv6 notation. It should be [::1]. I found a fix/workaround on the CUPS website, which said to add 'HostNameLookups On' to cupsd.conf.

There's still another problem--the HP backend keeps failing. Usually when I get ready to print it doesn't work and when I log in to cups, that's the error that greets me. When I tried to restart the printer, I'd have to wrestle with problem #1, so that makes things easier. I'll try to work on the backend problem later, especially since it seems to be worst with my daughter's computer, and she's the one who prints the most.

Contemplating

I'm thinking of making changes to this website. Whether I'll actually do that remains to be seen however.