Wednesday - February 23, 2022 - 18:06:02 (E.S.T.) - 7th Blog Entry

Cloud Labs, PHP DB Friction, and a Windows XP Throwback

My latest things that I've been doing have been working on labs through the Cloud Academy for my architect solutions certification. It was kind of funny because one of the latest labs I was working in was using AWS's DynamoDB to setup a database server through their console, and then accessing via the instance terminal and executing SQL commands once connected to the DB server. I ended up setting all this up last week for my own personal website for a weight loss competition that I'm currently running, but I've yet to get the database to work with my website via PHP. I'm getting some strange errors that I haven't had much time to debug lately, but I see myself ramping back up into that as I made some more updates to that website earlier today. You can find that live server running here if you're interested in taking a peek.

Some things that I'm trying to understand is why everytime I make an update to my .html or .php files, do I have to continually hit hard refresh in order for it to actually reload properly on my mobile. For instance, if I make some edits to my website, it will not properly reflect on my mobile device unless I hard refresh on my desktop pc. Very strange indeed. I'm sure there's a reason for it. I'm also working on responsive design for mobile on my site as well. In fact, the desktop version of my website looks like crap compared to the mobile version. I just haven't committed enough time yet to tweaking both of them. I do have some wonderful ideas, but I'll continue to just chip away at it slowy along with all the other things going on in my life.

So right now, I guess my next steps would be to add all of the data that I've been manually been storing in tables on my html site into an actual database, and then start figuring out how to bring that data into my website via PHP. It sounds a lot easier on paper than it is or else I would have it done already. LOL.

In other news, my buddy sent me a screen shot last night of him booting up an old PC that's been sitting for 20 years. It had Windows XP on it. It took about 25 minutes for the system to boot, and then he got this error. Needless to say, he didn't mess around to long. He ended up switching over to a laptop from the same time frame and booting up that. He was trying to burn some Dreamcast games. Yeah we go back that far! I never actually heard back if he got it to work or not out.

Because of that, somehow it reminded me of middle school when we used to play Glider on the old macs the school provided. I think this is around 1995-96 time frame? So, I was motivated to see if I could get a copy up and running on my local machine. Since I had to reinstall Linux about a month ago, I didn't have a use for virtual box up until this time, so I did a: sudo apt install virtualbox and fired it up. I found this link to download a copy of Glider. They say there's a Linux version available; but there isn't. Hence why I had to reinstall virtual box and snag a virtual disk image (.vdi) of Windows. I started with Windows 98 since this file I downloaded looked super old. I was able to boot up into Windows98 but there was all sorts of errors relating to dll files. I found out some people online had very similar issues and I found some fixes, but it still wasn't perfect. Rather than try and waste my time to figure out how to fix all this, I moved up to WindowsXP. Boy, this brought back so many memories! I actually really enjoyed WindowsXP. Probably my favorite operating system historically out of all the Windows versions. Anyway, this one fired up seamlessly, and I was able to install guest additions into virtualbox which was also installed within WindowsXP so I could accesss my local hard drive to install the files that I had downloaded for Glider.

Long story short, it installed rather quickly, and I was able to execute the game. You can find a video of it running here.