A Confederacy of …
May 20th, 2007 by lafnlabIn the book A Confederacy of Dunces there is a quote at the front by Jonathan Swift:
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
While I wouldn’t call myself a genius (I’m much too humble ;-) I certainly feel as if Dame Fortuna is against me at the moment. I decided to give Moodle a shot last night, so downloaded it. My PC has had a problem with Apache running PHP, but this has been going on for a while and since I have a webhost where I can upload things to try out, it isn’t such a big deal. I extract the zip file locally and upload it to the webhost. I start going through Moodle’s install script…and it gets to a point where it checks to see if my setup is minimally required, and it isn’t. It requires UTF-8 and MySQL 4.1. The server my site is on apparently uses MySQL 4.0 (strangely, the webhost’s main site says they have servers with MySQL 5.0.*). I didn’t see UTF-8 in the character sets for MySQL, but it doesn’t seem to have a problem with handling UTF-8. I’ve installed WordPress and MediaWiki without this problem and both of those use UTF-8. I have a feeling Moodle asks MySQL what character sets it supports and if it doesn’t see UTF-8, it gives an error. I think WordPress and MediaWiki probably just send the data without checking, or maybe the server had UTF-8 capability when I originally installed it. So this means I can’t install Moodle on my PC or my webhost. I’ll be talking to the webhost, but I’m going to try and set it up on my laptopt for the time being. The performance will be bad, but at this point I’m just wanting to tinker with it.
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