Author: frans

Professor of Information Studies and Interactive Media, esp. Digital Culture and Game Studies in the Tampere University, Finland. Occasional photographer and gardener.

Installing WordPress on Windows 2008 Server

I am a GUI person by heart, and have had my fair share of frustrations on trying to configure Linux through the various config files. While I am currently pretty satisfied on how reliably Apache and WordPress run on this Ubuntu setup, I’d also see whether I will get over some printer driver and sharing issues by installing a Windows server. To test this, I ordered another HP Proliant ML110 server (this one was running Xeon, a G5 setup). Physically all seems very similar to the system I am currently having the Linux.

I will know from experience this will take its time, and I try not to hurry. I have a functioning production environment in Linux, after all. Quickly thinking it through, it seems I need to set up at least the following:

  • install an IIS web server role
  • configure some additional features, such as rewrite rules
  • make sure I have sendmail or similar mail capabilities running
  • install MySQL and phpMyAdmin or similar tool
  • configure MySQL database for WordPress
  • install WordPress
  • set up the themes, widgets and other plugins
  • import the WordPress database contents from the old Linux installation to the new Windows Server one
  • make sure that all firewall rules, NAT redirections and such are pointing to right internal IPs and ports correctly for the new server to start functioning.

A time estimate for all this? No idea. I guess it might go smoothly, but with the usual hassles etc. I’d guess something around 40-50 hours of installation work and processes. Should perhaps be one or two months, if I use plenty of my free time to implement this. This day’s saldo? I have now the Server 2008 Web edition running (a trial version download, lets see how this works out), and I also managed to input the new MAC address into my router’s fixed address table so that I now have a fixed internal server IP where I can start building upon. I managed to also find a couple of helpful web resources that I should read and apply to my case next:

Any tips and tricks that I should take into consideration are also very welcome!

Microsoft envisions the future

It is always (well, almost always) fun to see how people illustrate the future; and usually we can learn a lot by studying the past future visions. Microsoft has a bit more money than most of us, and can thus create rather fancy futuristic videos:

Some of these things appear rather likely, incremental evolutions from the present paradigms of interactive and augmented computing. Some were a bit unclear to me — what was the point, how that was supposed to work. And in general, the feeling was a bit similar to after watching Minority Report — fascinated, but also a bit put off, in classic dystopian style.

Moblogging with a camera phone

I have been playing with some mobile tools in my kitchen and living room (the mobile weekend of a family man, I know). The camera phone that I am mostly using, Nokia N95 8GB, just got a new firmware, V 31.0.015, which brought along some nice additional or enhanced features. These include better integration to online photo sharing services. I am using Flickr, and now it is just one click away to share a photo through the default Internet service provider. Also, I noticed that the phone screen automatically tilts to vertical/horisontal (this sensor tech might have been in the previous firmware, too, I am not sure). In the background I am running Location Tagger, which captures the GPS coordinates into the photos’ metadata in a format Flickr can also read. You need to be close to a window for this to work indoors, of course. The app can cache the location data, though, which is handy. I have also Fring now running in the background, which is a mobile instant messenger program that is able to tap into Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk and Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and SIP Internet phone services, to start with. The downside now is that there is always something “interesting” going on in the damned device, so I might turn this off at some point. But the always-connected, automatically location tagging camera is something that I’d like to see in my SLR/main system, too, to look into the future.

Tiedon paikat seminar

Today’s seminar is titled “Tiedon paikat” (Places/Sites of Knowledge); it is organised by the Tampere Centre for Cultural Studies. More information here: http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/tacs/uutinen.php?item=32873
and here: http://tacs.wordpress.com/

Pictured are the seminar chair, professor Mikko Lehtonen, and the first speaker, Andrew Nestingen from the University of Washington.

Elina Ollila's dissertation

There is some more information available (in Finnish) concerning Elina Ollila’s PhD dissertation that I will be examinging together with Tony Manninen next Monday: http://www.tut.fi/public/index.cfm?MainSel=1&siteid=0&act=news&NewsID=57049&ID=57049

The full English title of the work is: Using Prototyping and Evaluation Methods in Iterative Design of Innovative Mobile Games. I cannot find the online version of dissertation at this time, but hopefully it will be made available later.

Edit: there will be also a streaming video & sound link to the event here: http://www.ollila.com/live

Speaking about online poker player experiences in Turku

I will tomorrow present some findings from our online poker player experience study in Turku (Päihdelääketieteen päivät, see programme here: http://www.terveysportti.fi/kotisivut/sivut.koti?p_sivusto=65). My presentation is also available as a PDF here: http://www.terveysportti.fi/kotisivut/docs/f585130802/mayra060309.pdf).

GameSpace seminar in Winter Assembly

Our two-year research project that looked into design and evaluation methodologies of casual, multiplayer and mobile games (also considering money gaming issues) has now finished; today the good folks at Winter Assembly event provided us the rooms to feature the results from research. Pictured is project manager Janne Paavilainen; other speakers included Annakaisa Kultima, Petri Ikonen, Jussi Holopainen and Jussi Laakkonen. The final research report will be published online (forthcoming during this spring). Links:

Edit: here are some camera-phone photos I took in the event: [link].

Games researcher meeting in Tampere

Today takes place (in Telakka restaurant, Tampere) the games researcher meeting organised by DiGRA Finland, Games as Services research project, Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies and Neogames centre. Pictured is Olli Sotamaa and some of the other, c. 30 participants. Much interesting talk and good company!

Didactics symposium keynote

Today I started my morning by delivering a keynote on Digital Games Literacy (in Finnish) in the national didactics symposium (a conference of Finnish learning researchers and teacher trainers). Pictured is professor Bernadette Baker, who spoke about multiple senses of ‘subject’ and how to reform the teacher – child – content relationships. The full programme is here: http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/okl/ad2009/ohjelma.html.

Moving to Windows 7

During weekend, I invested my two free hours to install the Windows 7 Beta (talk about leisure time, there). I was pleasantly surprised that the first public beta already seems so ready. I think that if I can get all my utility programs to run under it, I will probably move directly away from Vista (too many issues in that OS version still). The multiboot Win7/Vista/Ubuntu needed some tweaking — nice instructions are e.g. here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1035999

Windows 7, Beta 1
Windows 7, Beta 1