My First Word Processor

Talking about dot-matrix printers, a childhood memory of war (against the computer) comes back to me…

The year was when I was going to 7th grade (I’m 27 now, so calculate it yourself). A teacher wanted an assignment to be handed in computer-typed. No problem, I thought, I have WordStar and a printer.

At home, I booted up my DOS PC, put in the WordStar disk (5.25 inch!), and typed “ws.exe”. Bzzt, bzzt, I was back in DOS. Damnit, the program was infected with a virus!

With the assignment due the next day, I was desperate.

“I know, I’ll use Quick Basic’s features to control the printer, and make it print what I want”. All my program did: wait for input, and print it out. But the variable to hold the input can have a maximum of 255 characters!

“No problem, I’ll just stop after typing 3 full lines with 80 characters each, and press Enter. Put the whole thing in a while loop.”.

So that’s what I did, the printer screeching every time I hit Enter. One time I hit Enter too soon, leaving, aieieie, a big nasty gap in the middle of the page, catastrophe! (Was it in the middle of a word too? Can’t recall).

I was quite proud handing in that piece of paper with unformatted lines filling it. I tried to explain to my physics teacher why there was a gap in the middle, but looking back at it, I don’t think he cared…

Swearing Helps…

Anyway, here’s one for the Googlers out there.

If, while trying to install mod_python into Apache in Windows, you get an error like this:

Syntax error on line 173 of C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache2/conf/httpd.conf:
Cannot load C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache2/modules/mod_python.so into server: The specified module could not be found.

, here’s how to fix it:

Include the python directory into your PATH environment variable
(set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Python24 or something similar to that), and then try again.

The “fucking hell, so simple and it took me so long!” some people heard from my room was proof that the solution worked for me.

The error is incorrect, anyway, it’s supposed to say something more in the lines of “the module failed to load.”. If it still doesn’t work, make sure you’re using the module for the correct versions of Apache and Python.