I was asking designjunky and boyplankton for some help with a function that I needed to write. I wanted a simple snippet that
would output a variable name and it's value to the screen for debugging PHP. I just thought I'd post my solution.

The difficulty I was having was being able to pass a variable's name and a variable's value while only typing the
variable once.

----- PHP On -----

function output($var)
{
     $name = '$'.$var;
     $value = $GLOBALS[$var];
     echo $name;
     echo " = ";
     var_export($value);
}
$room_dept = 'bathroom';
output(room_dept);

----- PHP Off -----

This will output: $room_dept = 'bathroom'

I was digging through my old file cabinet doing a little bit of spring cleaning and found something that falls somewhere between woefully nostalgic and historically abhorrent. This little item is an new condition, unopened, circa 1994, version 1.1 America Online installation disk for Microsoft Windows. Here are a few of the highlights. There are more pictures after the cut.

Apparently, the biggest benefit of this service includes 10 FREE hours of access to something called the "Internet" where you can "download" things at an amazing rate. In about the same time that it takes me to drive to Salt Lake and back to pick up a large box of assorted disks with programs, games and utilities from a guy who has no clue what to do with them, I could drive to Salt Lake and back to pick up a small box of about 30 blank disks and have just enough time to start to download something. All of this for free! Except of course gas for my van and the cost of disks.

There is of course added value in the form of a statement on the inside of the package: "If you're having trouble connecting to America Online for Windows or need a different disk type or size, call us toll-free at 1-800-827-6364."

I'm sure this is powerfully dull for most, but after getting some BASH scripting help from boyplankton I just wanted to show my latest prompts. What's important here is that I'm including some rudamentary flow control so I only have to have one set of scripts to customize both the root and casey prompts for simplicity sake.

Another feature makes us of the .bash_aliases script so I can get "ls -ahlp --color=auto" by simply typing "ls". I can also get a whopping "cd ..; ls -ahlp --color=auto" with just "..". My favorite of course, is creating the command "rebash" by filling in with "source ~/.bashrc".

...is still just a little success for me. I finally got some networking things figured out and I feel great about the screen-cap above. It shows that all of the machines in my sci-fi harem are connected, have proper ip addresses and have host names that show up on the router.

This was a challenge for me because of my Fundamental Inability to Comprehend Networking and All That Entails (FICNATE). Because I managed to pull it off, I now have a fully working platform for learning how to do load balancing, test file backup schemes, and a whole bunch of things I can try without crashing my live servers. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I would like to try and I have to start a list.

If you have any ideas for things that can be done with my network, the more absurd the better, let me know and I'll scribe it to a text file somewhere in my house.