Thursday, February 24, 2005

Too many things

Okay recently I have realized there are just too many things that I want to learn to do.

I'll provide a list:
  1. Write my own database driven website
  2. Learn to install, configure and administer a variety of things on Linux
  3. Get good at html (possibly XHTML), PHP, CSS, and SQL
  4. Learn the Japanese language
  5. Learn to map using hammer editor (for half life 2 and other source engine games)
I'll go over them one by one:
1) I want to create a database driven website because it would involve real life implementation of PHP and SQL and I feel would be a good learning experience. Some of the most popular and useful websites around interface with a database, as its a very good way to efficiently add content and further allow inexperienced future administrators add content to the site.

2) Linux is a growing issue and becoming more and more popular as a server operating system as well as slowly getting a small corner of the desktop OS market. The underlying kernel and gnu tools are far superior to that of any version of DOS or windows that Microsoft have created. It would be really nice to know this OS inside out for server and desktop use alike, and I hope that Linux continues to gain popularity. I can already use Linux on the commandline at a novice level.

3) HTML is a very simple way to help you present information for use on your website, but nowerdays it isn't enough alone.
The fun starts when you begin to manage things smartly using cascaded style sheets so that you can keep a consistent style over your site and leave it easy to maintain and make changes to your style.
PHP works behind the scenes on the server side of things and processes the information before presenting plain text to be sent to a users browser, it is incredibly useful and powerful in creating dynamic websites while maintaining a fairly simple to learn syntax.
SQL (structured query language) is useful from things like a large company's database of employee details, to the catalogue of products used on an online shop.

4) The Japanese language, to me, sounds really interesting and has a rather different sentence structure than English. I'm a sucker for anime and manga, and it would be great to understand these things without relying on a translation. I just feel it would be rewarding to have learned the language and then go on a holiday to Japan. This is, admittedly the most unlikely thing on my list for me to fully learn.

5) Valve built a famous modding community with the game half life, and now Half Life 2 has been released they are further acknowledging the degree to which all the modding has helped keep the game popular. I would personally love to be part of a mod project to make something original for the Source engine (which I feel will be pretty much a standard engine for years to come for peoples mod projects right through to machinema projects. It can be run effectively from the now bog-standard geforce 5200 or less, but has all the power to look stunning on a brute of a card like the geforce 6800 ultra.).

Well, this is my first blog post (ever) and I hope it didn't drag out too much. ^_^;;