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I have volunteered to help implement a courser review guide for UIUC's HKN web site. We are going to be using an open source project called goodprofornot that was invented by some students in UC Berkeley as their software project. The whole thing is written in python with some of the databases being handled by mySQL. There is more information at goodprofornot

I wasted a considerable amount of time trying to twiddle with the apache server on my powerbook trying to get it to process the .py files that are common to python. After much fiddling I was still not able to get it to work. I am pretty sure that python is installed because I have successfully run command line python scripts. So, after some web searching, I found that the simplest way to get the cgi to serve .py files was just to convert the .py into .cgi. And it was all good.

Then came the part about setting up mySQL. There was no clear mention on how we are going to set that up. And since I have no prior experience to mySQL, this endeavor would have to suffer some delay for the time being

After much contemplating I actually decided that I did not wish to be involve in this project. However, because I had already volunteered for it, there was no way they can put me into any other HKN committee. No committee == no hours earned! And that is bad.

The reason why this is a chore lies in the fact that no one knows how to set up the thing. Setting this site up requires some form of technical expertise with apache, mySQL, and also python. While I am fairly well-versed in python, I am not comfortable brawling my brains against apache and mySQL. Moreover, it requires the use of a linux server since the current IIS server has no python support. Not being one who is familiar with linux network security, I decided that to go head on with the idea of installing a new server will just let to some script kiddie hacking down the HKN site.

So what am I to do? A meeting will probably be scheduled next week with the person-in-charge and we will work something out. Even in the worst case scenario, we can just make the page static html. That is not too bad an idea since static pages with updated info is much better than a dynamic page that never changes. That is, at least, what I think.