runtah

As I may (or may not) have mentioned before, I mostly blog here for the purpose of note-keeping for myself. In most of the cases I dont really care about how good the tutorials (not so much) are coming out. So, please do your homework if you are following any of my tutorials at all. This is gonna be a disclaimer somewhere, but see? I cant give a damn here. Thanks.
I was trying my hands on the Google App Engine. My system is Linux so I downloaded, followed the linux part of things from their official how-to-first-time page here [ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/gettingstarted/installing ]
As you can see from that page (yeah, thats a dependency) you
1. Download the PHP SDK
2. Extract it some nice place
3. Write a "hello world!" PHP script
4. Execute the python script (dev_appserver.py) in the the "google_appengine" (if you havent done it otherwise) folder.
BUT ! I got stuck here for sometime, and looked up for the fix.
Source of the problem:

_PHPBinaryError: The path specified with the --php_executable_path flag () does not exist.

Which naturally implied 2 things

1. The PHP installation was NOT as the app engine wants it to be
2. God doent want me to code anymore

I naturally believe God loves it when Im busy with my favourite thing so number 2 was obsolete. I looked up on Google for some solutions and a sudden SO page suggested that executing the appserver executable like

./dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path="...path..to..the..php-cgi..executable..." helloworld

will solve the problem.
Following this trail I came to notice that my ignorance toward the tutorials PHP installation paid of here. The problem was actually my PHP installtion was a CLI version. While the app engine essentially wants a CGI version. For doing so, the tutorial has very good instructions, and yes, php-cgi is NOT available in Ubuntu repos. So I did

sudo apt-get install gcc libmysqlclient-dev libxml2-dev
 wget --trust-server-names http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.4.15.tar.bz2/from/us1.php.net/mirror
 tar xjf php-5.4.15.tar.bz2
 cd php-5.4.15
 ./configure --prefix=$PWD/installdir --enable-bcmath --with-mysql
 make install
 cd -

And afterwards executed

./dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path="...path..to..the..php-cgi..executable..." helloworld

And it went smooth. :) By the way, the above method will NOT harm you normal PHP installation.

While trying to design a form so that it takes multiple inputs from text fields and multiselect selection menus, I was facing problem because even though I could handle a fixed number of fields in my script internally, what for multiple selections in a selection list?? The rescuer [] :)
Yes, just use it after the name of you input field, this way.

<select multiple class="input-medium search-query" id="autolist-filter-select" name="filter_str[]">

<input id="autolist-filter-text1" type="text" name="filter_str[]"/> <input id="autolist-filter-text2" type="text" name="filter_str[]"/>