Installing Moodle on Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server

To get started, there’s some excellent instructions available for download as a PDF.

Additional things I did:

• Downloaded PHP 5.2.5
• Get the appropriate php_dblib.dll (as mentioned in Using FreeTDS on Windows)
• Followed these instructions on getting PHP working

I tried to set up the FastCGI extension for IIS, but after getting some weird errors, decided to leave it for another time.

This did end up taking a lot longer that I’d hoped. But at least it is working now.

Mobile browsing

Microsoft claimed that Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 6 was a big improvement on previous versions. That wouldn’t be hard, seeing as earlier versions were roughly equivalent to most of IE3/4.

Unfortunately, IE for WM6 isn’t that much better. Quite a few websites I visit render poorly on it.

I’m a big fan of Mozilla, and they’ve produced Minimo. This runs like a very slow dog and seems to crash more often than not. Hopefully it will improve over time, but I’m not sure that there’s much (if any) further development going on.

I tried Opera’s mobile browser, which looked really good. It costs money however, and I’d prefer not to pay for a web browser.

Today I came across Skyfire. It’s a free browser, initially for Windows Mobile 5 & 6. It’s still in Beta, and for some weird reason, while you can sign up for the beta, if you don’t have a US telephone number, you can’t get it at the moment. A bit strange as they do say it will work over WiFi too.

Windows Server 2008 released and Vista SP1 (almost)

I see that Windows Server 2008 has been released, and downloads are now on the Connect site.

Vista Service Pack 1 as also been finalised, but it appears it won’t be available for download until Mid-March.

Looks like we need to be a bit more patient, unless they do make it available on the Connect site prior to the regular public Microsoft Downloads site.