Thesis Pains

Woo. A close one. My neck is fine. You know what they say... no pain, no gain. How is this relevant? You will see shortly. For those of you who are not quite interested in programming/work I suggest you stop reading now and come back another day :). Maybe you can read on and try to see how much you CAN understand - a game, as it were.

Ok. I've been trying to get the bastard dotLRN to work (a learning management system). Everything would install fine right up until the final step. I looked everywhere - dotLRN forums, google, system documentation. Nada. Zilch. So I started to read code to try and see what exactly happens during install... even worse. I mean... read this for an error.log.

So what I do is post into my learning journal (a requirement for my thesis) saying something like "i've tried really hard but I can't install it... will try harder this week". Then I have one last crack at it - this time by downloading everything via CVS. Guess what? Everything works. So I haven't been able to use dotLRN for one and a half weeks because the tarball on the downloads page is worthless. Great. Maybe I should tell the .LRN community.

So there you go, there's my weekend... stuck doing thesis work, but finally getting somewhere. Pain = huting my neck, Gain = progress on the thesis, relevance to the idiom = care factor = 0.