Contra Costa College - Intel - Student Code for Good Virtual Hackathon '13 Begins

Finals at Contra Costa College are over & we are immediately starting the hackathon.  We have planned which house each team will stay in, ground rules for each house, the food to order, & times to check-in with each other.  We have about 50 hours together in this event.

Some of the tech we
need for our hackathon:
computer, internet, microphone, music

It wouldn't be a hackathon without technology, so each hacker is bringing a laptop, if they have one.  We should be set with computers, internet, microphone, music.

During the hackathon, there will be a few teams, each working on their own project.  We will be using [Google Hangouts] to make it seem like we are together.  Every couple of hours we will have a scheduled check-in to update everyone of each teams' progress.

At the 1st check-in, things were quite chaotic.  Many of us were running around the house or trying to figure out Hangouts, so we didn't really have anything progress-wise to report.

In team Goldilocks, we have 2 groups.  The client side team & server side team.  The client side team made a prototype in Unity within the 1st day, but the server side had some issues.  We planned to do it in PHP, but needed to set up a server 1st.  We spent the whole day trying to figure out how to setup an Apache server with PHP on Windows, since we don't have a permanent Linux box running.  It seems Apache was not designed for Windows, so we had to find a specific old version of Apache that is compatible with a specific old version of PHP.  It was a long hunt since we didn't have a good lead.  Not only that, but the instructions to set up PHP on Apache was incomplete or non-existent.

For those who are interested in a Windows installation:

1. Get Apache installer, version 2.0.64 [Here]
   Install it & note down it's path
   
   
2. Get PHP installer, version 5.2VC6 [Here]
   Install it & note down it's path
   
   
3. Open "Apache2\conf\httpd.conf" with a text editor
   If you are on Vista or newer, you may have permission issues editing the file, so copy it somewhere you can edit, then replace with the updated file later.
   
   
4. At the end of the file, there's a PHP segment.  Update the values to point to the correct place, like:
   

   #BEGIN PHP INSTALLER EDITS - REMOVE ONLY ON UNINSTALL
   PHPIniDir "C:/PHP"
   LoadModule php5_module "C:/PHP/php5apache2.dll"
   #END PHP INSTALLER EDITS - REMOVE ONLY ON UNINSTALL

   
   If you pasted in the path, don't forget to replace the Windows "\" with the normal "/".
   
   
5. [Optional] Change the DocumentRoot& DirectoryIndex variables if you need.  Mine are set to:
   

   DocumentRoot "C:/Apache/Web"
   DirectoryIndex index.php

   
   DocumentRootis not the same asServerRoot.  This caused me big trouble when I set the server's root to the web page root.
   
   
6. Add Apache.exe to your firewall's exception list [located in: Apache2\bin\]
   
   
7. Double click the Apache icon [red feather] in your tray, then stop & start your Apache server
   The restart button gave me trouble, so I click stop then start instead
   
   
8. If the instructions don't work or is not clear enough, comment below.  Let me know.

That was our biggest road block in the 1st day.  After a bit of rest, we should be ready to code.