I agree here, too. I was foolish to jump on the bandwagon. :)

If you're looking just to learn and not spend any money at all, you could always set up a Linux flavor running on VirtualBox. It's a lot of effort and I daresay you'd learn a lot about many things, but it may not be viable. 

Such a virtual machine would be portable and very forgiving of catastrophic mistakes. (oh no! I didn't mean to "rm -fr *" THERE!)

I've used virtual machines on my desktop for years for one-off experiments that I could toss when done. That and running Windows 3.1 to remind myself of how far we've come. :) The only catch is that you need a fair bit of RAM on your desktop to get away with this.

--Joel

Joel Richard
IT Specialist, Web Services Department
Smithsonian Institution Libraries | http://www.sil.si.edu/
(202) 633-1706 | [log in to unmask]




On Mar 23, 2011, at 11:19 AM, Mark A. Matienzo wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Cindy Harper <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Maybe I shouldn't be trolling code4lib for my personal interests
> 
> No, you definitely should be!
> 
>> My college is not enthused about
>> librarians creating code or platforms that the college becomes responsible
>> for maintaining - we're very abstemious in that regard.  So I'm seeing how I
>> can do this personally spending my personal cash without burdening my
>> college.  Sorry to bother you all with it.  Everyone's happy family is
>> different, to hash a quote, but I hope I'm still welcome in Code4Lib, even
>> if I'm not hired to be a library coder.
> 
> You're definitely welcome here, and I don't think Bill's response was
> to suggest that you weren't. We didn't know the circumstances, and we
> just wanted to make sure we understood why you wanted to do this.
> Learning through doing is fine.
> 
> That said, I recommend any of the options - as for learning, I'd say a
> virtualized "slice" server can't be beat.
> 
> Mark A. Matienzo
> Digital Archivist, Manuscripts and Archives
> Yale University Library