Updating all the timezone stuff one needs on a LAMP environment: (necessary in Australia because they changed the daylight savings start date once again). I haven't yet been able to convince my hosting provider to go through all this hassle; and the tables are outdated - so Aussie visitors may see an incorrect time on some of my websites for the next week. 

Test:

# zdump -c 2009 -v Australia/Sydney | grep 2008
Australia/Sydney  Sat Apr  5 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Apr  6 02:59:59 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600
Australia/Sydney  Sat Apr  5 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Apr  6 02:00:00 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney  Sat Oct  4 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Oct  5 01:59:59 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney  Sat Oct  4 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Oct  5 03:00:00 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600

(If the first two lines contain 'Mar' instead of 'Apr' you've got old tables). e.g. this is what an unpatched system would report:

# zdump -c 2009 -v Australia/Sydney | grep 2008
Australia/Sydney  Sat Mar 29 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Mar 30 02:59:59 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600
Australia/Sydney  Sat Mar 29 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Mar 30 02:00:00 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney  Sat Oct 25 15:59:59 2008 UTC = Sun Oct 26 01:59:59 2008 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=36000
Australia/Sydney  Sat Oct 25 16:00:00 2008 UTC = Sun Oct 26 03:00:00 2008 EST isdst=1 gmtoff=39600

Debian:

# apt-get update 

# apt-get install tzdata

PHP5.x

# apt-get install php5-dev 

[fetch and save] http://pecl.php.net/get/timezonedb

# tar zxvf timezonedb-xxxxxxx.tgz

# cd timezonedb-xxxxxxx

# phpize

# ./configure

# make

# make install

# echo "extension=timezonedb.so"  > /etc/php5/conf.d/timezonedb.ini

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

MySQL:

# mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root mysql -p

(ignore all the errors from Riyadh{NN}, iso3166.tab, and zone.tab) 

Some notes to save somebody some grief:

Installing the Oracle libraries and access module into an existing PHP5 installation on Debian...

First grab the Linux instantclient from oracle.com - you'll also need the client SDK kit. Here I'm using instantclient 11.1

create a directory for these such as /home/oracle and unpack both of them to that directory.

Go into the oracle directory (and into the instantclient_11_1 directory) and create a symlink:

$ ln -s libclntsh.so.11.1 libclntsh.so

Grab the oci8 PECL package and unpack it somewhere (~/oci).

Make sure you have the following packages (in addition to php5, php5-cli, apache2, etc).

  php5-dev

  libaio1

Go to the oci8 directory (~/oci/oci8-1.3.0). Forget about 'pecl build' - which won't work. Well it will, but it will quietly and quickly remove all the built packages before you can save them or install them. Yargghh. I wasted half a day trying to fix this one. 

Better to just build by hand:

$ ./configure --with-oci8=instantclient,/home/oracle/instantclient_11_1 

$ make

Fix any errors/warnings before continuing

Don't make install, which won't work.

$ cp ./modules/oci8.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs

Replace 20060613+lfs with whatever module directory has been setup for you in /usr/lib/php5

Create /etc/php5/conf.d/oci8.ini:

----

extension=oci8.so

----

Now run the php cmdline in verbose mode (php -v) and see if everything loaded. Fix it if it didn't.

You may need some env variables setup in your /etc/init.d/apache2 file to make everything work and actually execute queries, but a phpinfo() at this point should show your oci8 extension. See the php.net Oracle pages if you need help with the env variables.

As I ponder the Microsoft/Yahoo! issue a bit more, what strikes me is Microsoft's arrogance. No, that's nothing new. But it's the corporate mindset that says 'We have to dominate online search'. Why? Why does Microsoft feel they have to dominate every software category that has ever existed, online and off? Why is it that nobody else can make a profit in the tech industry, without Microsoft threatening to take the ball away from them?

Google may make bold statements, the same way Netscape once made bold statements, but the fact of the matter is that Google is doing nothing to threaten Microsoft's business. McSoft's worst enemy is themselves and their arrogance. Get rid of that, and a tech industry could flourish - one where everybody can make new products and create markets and grow the industry as a whole. As it is today, you live in constant fear of being successful, because if you actually make money, you'll be in McSoft's laser sights and they'll stop at nothing to wipe you off the face of the earth. It's difficult for anybody to thrive under that kind of pressure.  

Microsoft is making a bid to buy Yahoo!. Surprise, shock... What words could describe my emotion on hearing this?

I can see the motivation and the reasoning behind it. They want to put a stop to Google ("I'd like to buy a noun, please."). Still I believe this is the wrong way to do it. The only way for them to stop Google is to buy Google. Don't laugh. They are ideologically more closely aligned than you might realize. I don't believe that they've thought through the consequences of this decision - or maybe they have but just don't care. It is a culture clash of epic proportions that will result pretty much in the destruction of Yahoo! and all they've ever done - and do nothing to harm Google. I suspect many of the employees will quit outright, and there's not much place for them to go in Silicon Valley except to side with the enemy (Google), the largest employer in the valley that's still adding significant headcount.

But I also believe that this move can't be stopped, so it doesn't really matter what I think about it. I would however like to share with you the exact image that popped into my brain on hearing this.

Sometime later this month "Diary and Other Rantings" (i.e. my weblog) will turn 7 years old, and I'll start my eighth year doing this activity called 'blogging'. Perhaps I'll mark the day, perhaps not. We'll see. Maybe I'll just stop doing it altogether. Maybe not. We'll see.

This all started in early 2001. I was at AOL making lots and lots of money from my Netscape stock options. I had a Netscape employee home page that was visited hundreds of thousands of times a day, but this was slowing. AOL no longer linked to it. I had started running a new server in the spare bedroom in 1998-1999, and later moved it to the garage. It took almost two years to get a working DSL link so that I could actually run a public website off of it. High-speed internet to the home was still an experimental technology. DSL wasn't yet ready for prime time and ISDN had other issues which plagued it. Leased-line required somebody to sell you an end-point on the public net and nobody was doing this, besides being limited to 56k which was now the speed of most modems. Web 'hosting' in those days was mostly for big business and costed big money. I could certainly afford it, but decided to spend my cash on more important things (like buying  a music store a year later).

Running a Linux box with an internet link isn't very expensive in the overall scheme of things. So once the DSL was finally working I made a new home page and started improving it.

I think it was Cindy at 'Off the Beaten Path' (now at 'dustingmybrain.com' ) who first introduced me to the concept of a rambling page. Instead of replacing your 'Current Interests' web page every week, you just keep adding to it. Drop in a date. Write what's happening. I started doing this. I was writing HTML in emacs. I called it an online diary. I didn't have titles, categories, RSS feeds, etc. These would come much later. I wasn't writing 'articles', I was just rambling. Why do you need a title for it? That makes it look so structured. The only important thing is the date, so somebody knows when it was that you thought this way. This was important. After several years of living on Netscape time, I firmly believed that one didn't think the same way for very long, and technology was always changing - so information had to have a date.

The other thing that I did was to take a cue from some of the large online news sites, which were the best model available for presenting information that had timestamps. I started writing in reverse chronological order (recent first). This was born of necessity, since nobody wanted to load a large page and scroll to the end to find recent stuff; which was how we did things previously (logfile format).  

In fact I maintained this format for a few years until it became unmanageable. Then I looked for ways of automating my monthly (or whenever) process of moving the current entries to an archive page and starting fresh. So after looking to see what programs were available and trying a few of them, I instead wrote a program to do it myself. Over time that evolved from a simple diary 'archiver' to the thing that you see today - a mega social portal that does everything but make coffee. (I miss this incidentally, I had my computer turn on the coffee pot from an online request in the early 1980s using my first homebrew social portal).  

I still wonder whether anybody reads these pages. Does anybody care? I don't subscribe to the current notions of SEO and affiliate marketing and trackware and all the other ways to improve one's blog ranking. Most notable these days are the pages and pages of 'widgets' attached to every blog, selling everything from online communities to soap. Why bother? Your only visitors will be other bloggers that are all trying to get you to visit their own blog. They aren't really reading what you have to say, they're too busy 'selling' their own wares. Still even after the RSS fiasco a few months back, I manage to pull in a few thousand humans a week. They come and read a page and leave again. This is the state of the modern internet.

It may be of some interest that I've managed to serve up a few hundred million pages since this all started - mostly to crawlers and robots; however last year activity peaked with about 100,000 daily hits (30,000 human visitors) and we've had six or seven days with over a million hits. I've written close to 1500 articles and there have been about 6600 total articles at one time or another from various feeds - before I was forced to nuke them for legal reasons. Only about 250 comments total, which I attribute to my decision a couple years back to do away with the daily spam cleanup and only allow website members to post comments. [I've since revised this policy.]

The 'community portal' (which I started writing a couple of years ago) doesn't have much community and I don't know if that will ever change. Community folks like big parties and unless you have one, you're late to the party. Bloggers only like communities where they can sell their blog.  I don't know how to convince them that a long-running website with several thousand non-blogging human visitors a week is actually a good place to drop a link. Yeah, I could put you on my blogroll, but I read thousands of blogs. It would quickly grow to be unmanageable and you'd be lost in the noise. 

But you can add your own link and profile page and whatever - you don't need me to do it. Hint, hint.  

Anyway - we'll see if this lasts or whether I just decide that there are better things to do. Write into space everyday and maybe a couple of people will read it. Maybe not.

That's what it's all about.

Don't ask yourself if it is actually relevant or important or whether anybody cares. You might not like to hear the true answer. It's one blog amongst hundreds of millions, all trying to be visited. All thinking they should be relevant to somebody. It's like asking if one star in the entire universe is relevant. Maybe one is relevant to somebody. But the big question looms, is it yours? Unless it's the sun and brings life to this planet, it's likely just another star in the vastness of space.  

In fact, nobody really cares whether you blog or not when all is said and done. Well maybe one or two folks. In my case those are the same one or two folks that cared back in 2001. Everybody else is just passing through on their way to somewhere else.

Still every day (sometimes two) I go to my website and ramble about what's on my mind. I tweak the software to make it better. Even knowing that it is all an exercise in futility. Strange.  

The school's weather station webpage seems to have stuffed it sometime around Thanksgiving. Today somebody finally noticed and alerted the support staff.

My boss asks "where's the documentation?".

Right.  There is none. This system has been in place for ten years or more and fails occasionally.  When that happens we go in and fix it.

Start with the webpage that actually displays the data. It's pulling the data from a file that is supposed to be automagically updated. Except we don't believe in magic. The file didn't get updated. Now to find out why.

Since this is a scheduled event, cron has to be involved. Let's have a look at the crontab file. Hmmm. It's pulling the changes from another file that is supposed to be automagically updated. That one hasn't been changing either. What changes that file? It isn't cron. Or is it? That file is symlinked to a file on another computer. Let's go have a look at the other computer. Ah, I see. There's a crontab running there which generates the contents of the update file from a data file via a collection of python scripts. Let's have a look at those. 

As I suspected, they are pulling data from yet another file that is automagically updated. Right. It hasn't changed since November either. What changes this file? Time to scan the logs. Nothing.

OK, it's time to start from the other direction. The weather station is connected to a PC in the corner of a lab. Let's have a look there. It's hung and totally unresponsive. OK, maybe that's the problem. I reboot it. Then go back to the webpage. Nope. Nothing has changed.

OK, somehow the data has to get from the weather station computer to the other computer where the python scripts can munge it. Let's have a look at the logs.

The logs say everything is fine, but it isn't fine. Nothing. It's not happening. Well this is interesting. I check connectivity and network connections. They're OK. We've got an IP addess and pings work just fine. A closer look reveals that there's a Windows task scheduler which occasionally FTP's the weather files across the net to the second Unix box. The logs don't show any errors. Hmmm. The files aren't being FTP'd though. They aren't making it. Then I see a notice at the bottom of the screen. Updates were applied some time since the computer was last powered on - six months ago. OK, what updates? Windows firewall. Right. So I have a look, and sure enough the computer's FTP connection has been firewalled because of an automatic update. The FTP's are silently failing - and indicating success. This is pure evil. After several minutes I'm able to get in with an administrator account that can fix the firewall and do so. 

Then have another look. Still nothing happening. What could be the problem now? Ah, on reboot FTP is automatically disabled on the weather station software - again without any warnings. The logs again say everything is working and files are being transferred. More evil. What's the use of having log files if they lie to you? I turn on the FTP. Bingo - now the files get through. Now back to the second computer to manually process the files and dump them into the directory where the third computer can pick them up. Then back to the third computer to manually update the processed files.

Yay! It works.

Back to the documentation. How would somebody document stuff like this? There's just too much that can go wrong. I could use up a tree or two writing it all down. This is why we've got systems folks. 

Unless you've been watching closely, this announcement was easy to miss. Sun Microsystems is acquiring MySQL. This has ramifications both good and bad.

This will likely affect a huge number of people who are currently using open source web applications; a majority of which are being stored on MySQL databases. Their future viability is now questionable. It all depends on the license and revenue models Sun chooses to adopt.

I would also try to steer clear of the pending 6.0 release as it is likely to involve significant re-structuring of the code to suit Sun's business requirements. It may be a year or three before it stabilises again. Sun is legendary for introducing layers of bureaucracy into development projects.  

While Sun may make public announcements of their intent to continue to provide the product for free [and it should be noted that there was no such announcement in the press release], it is difficult to imagine the corporate bean counters not making a recommendation to derive as much revenue stream as possible from the acquisition.

You can read the announcement here. 

Also of potential interest is this (dated) history of MySQL 

Just turned on my 'Related Articles' plugin. I've been having some fun with it. Click on 'Random Article' or view any individual article (not a page full) to seed the process. Then down on the left hand side of the page (way down) is the list of related articles. I noticed lots of interesting brain warps and rants over the years that actually do follow some strange twist or turn of logic. 

Looks like I got sidetracked from my original mission to use this website as an xml playground to explore and develop new communications technologies, and instead wrote a social portal that hardly anybody cares about. That was a few years ago now. Well, I haven't given up. It just took a while to reach the state where I can get beyond the user-interface plumbing and get back to the machine interfaces which is where the fun is.  

Feeds have improved a lot. I'm using Atom paging now. Still holding off on atom-thread for comments since I can do it so much easier embedding into the articles - though I note that the latest Firefox parses atom-thread just fine. No use forcing it on the public until a few more feedreaders have jumped on board. The code has been working for a year or two, but I'm just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up before I turn it back on.

I've been playing with a weblog export tool that's basically an Atom feed, but replaces images and attachments with inline data: URL's. Have had a few glitches - including a PHP bug in the regular expression library that I need to report. But this in theory can let you take an entire weblog and move it elsewhere as one gigantic XML file. Everything. Images, attachments, comments, categories, the whole nine yards. 

I've also got Atom Publishing Protocol support in a very primitive state (but not yet ready for prime time). This is a big effort and I don't expect to be finished for a few months. I've got a suitable framework, but this site works a bit differently than the model used by the atom publishing spec. It will take a while to resolve all the differences so it plays nicely. This would for instance allow you to import your entire weblog from elsewhere in the world - especially one that used data: URLs to bring in images and attachments. Otherwise if I use the default model, I've got to package everything into a workspace for export, and this takes more than one file to represent all the structures completely. But that's the big picture - on a smaller scale, you should soon be able to publish weblog posts from your cell phone, or sync new articles with another weblog you may have. I 'm also not bothering with the xml-rpc remote mechanisms for publishing. They're primitive now, the api's too fragmented, and pretty much dead.

Oh yeah, and we've got trackbacks now - for any weblog that allows non-member comments. This is a flavor of xml-rpc. It isn't a big deal, but a few folks have requested it. You can find the trackback URL in the 'more actions' menu of articles - that is for any member weblogs that allow them. Mine does.  

Oh, and photo albums can now be exported as zip files. That has nothing to do with XML...

I've been working with some dynamic text/font resizing tools recently. Some visitors over the last few days may have seen some of these efforts in progress, but I've just turned them off again until I get it all sorted.

In order to change the text size on a page after it's loaded, and without re-loading, one has to walk the DOM tree and re-calculate every font size on the page. There are actually a few open-source packages which will do the dirty work, but there are still a lot of issues. Almost all of these center around MSIE (why am I not surprised?). Additionally, it takes some work to get them to play nicely with sifr - the modern day equivalent of webfonts; which was abandoned around the turn of the millennium as being too infected with DRM controls to ever mass deploy.

Anyway, if you're interested in doing dynamic font scaling, I'd like to point you to JS magnifier, which is a pretty cool little app for walking the DOM and changing all the sizes. I had a bit of trouble with it on web forms, because it listens for key events, and if you type -,+,<,or > anywhere it changes the page size - even if you were typing these into a text field. Rather than modify the event listener to determine if it was a form and check the current focus, I just commented out the event listener and used JS links to activate the functions. 

But then on IE, everything was screwed up. First of all, even with a setting of '0' (no change), the page always goes through a resize cycle after you load it, and a lot of inherited sizes got messed up and set to something obscenely small. You can fix these by declaring them '!important', but you'll likely end up with over half your size tags set to !important in order to render your original page anywhere close to what it was designed to look like. 

The real trouble began however doing the DOM walk. IE does some real funny stuff to their DOM (this shouldn't be a surprise to anybody either). If you've got an embedded video, and there are any troubles loading the video, the entire DOM tree from that point forward seems to get rebuilt (resulting in the font size reverting for part of the page). The same thing happens if you've got AJAX-updated content on the page - every time there's an update, everything from that div to the end of the page reverts.

Looks like I'm back to square one. Think I'll go back to my original plan which I never quite finished implementing, but basically use proportional (em) fonts everywhere [this I do already], and then dynamically change the main body font declaration on the fly as the CSS page goes down the wire. This is hardly dynamic - it results in the need for a page reload to render everything correctly. At least it's portable and doesn't require javascript or depend on anybody's screwy DOM implementation. Oh well, live and learn I guess.  

AOL finally pulled the plug on its branded version of Firefox which it amusingly calls 'Netscape'. Those of us who were a part of the real Netscape can only laugh. I haven't used the AOL browser in years and never really cared for it. But it's sort of the end of an era and I feel a bit saddened. The web browser with the 'N' is no more.

Long live Firefox.

Link 

Oh, and I'm sorry but iceweasel? What's the point?

I was recently reflecting on my startup days at Netscape more than a decade ago. What was compelling about what we were trying to accomplish at the time was to make operating systems irrelevant.

Netscape tried to accomplish this by embedding what once were typically operating system functions into a multi-protocol window onto the world (the web browser). It had your text editor, the aforementioned web browser, a window system (aka frames) and a programming language or two (Java and JavaScript) to tie it all together and turn it into a general purpose information and communication appliance. The consensus at the time was that this would make the underlying operating system (*nix, Windows, Apple, OS/2, whatever) irrelevant. If you had this tool on your computer, you could work on any computer, any platform, and be able to do all of your information related tasks.

Needless to say, this grand idea failed. The browser is still around, but the original idea was lost along the way. New browsers don't come with the same tools we tried to provide back then. Java and calendaring in particular are now separate add-ons, as is the email package - available separately.

But does that mean Netscape lost? Well yeah, Netscape did. They're gone. But the concept of operating system irrelevance didn't. As I write this (on a Windows box), I've got windows open to Unix servers, I've got Unix command shells and utilities, I've got typical Unix programming languages and databases and web servers all running in this alien environment. It's actually impressive how far we've come. I'm currently dumping a remote Linux file system to a local (Windows) disk drive using nothing but Unix commands. ssh, tar, bash. These are all running on the Windows box using Cygwin, which comes with a couple hundred native Unix commands. I've got my familiar LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web programming environment via XAMPP; which I'm developing with emacs. Remote system monitors running via X (the Unix windowing system) and being displayed on my desktop via Cygwin/X. I've even got my mouse setup with hover-to-focus mode.  The only thing that provides solid evidence that I'm not running a Unix operating system is the IE icon on the desktop (which I never use).

And this is all running on Windows.

So the operating system is completely irrelevant. It's just something that sits in the background and allows you to launch programs. Just like we envisioned back in the '90s. OK, not exactly like we envisioned, but I'm quite comfortable with the end result.

Apparently not HTML valid either.

I'm referring of course to Microsoft's IE homepage...

Check it out for yourself...

Still struggling with device drivers on Windows Vista. The sound card drivers have an update, but I'm skeptical. Several folks reported BSOD when they installed it. 

And I've lost any good feelings I had for Debian. Recently I moved my old RedHat installation to a newer PC - one that was only 8 years old rather than 10. All went extremely smooth. On bootup, it found the new motherboard, new network card, mouse, monitor, etc. - and configured all of them.  Everything worked fine.

Then I upgraded to Debian. The RedHat was a couple of years old, and I didn't want to mess with building PHP, MySQL, and Apache upgrades as well. Just boot up a newer Linux. Debian is currently one of the more popular Linux flavors - and I especially like the APT package management utility. Need PHP? 'apt-get install php'. You don't need to build and configure it and mess with library dependencies. These are all taken care of. If it needs new libraries, these are installed as well as any libraries that they depend on. 

Anyway, now (a couple of weeks later) I put in another newer PC - this time only 4 years old. I was expecting everything to go smoothly like it did last time. But it didn't. Debian doesn't have very good hardware (re-)detection, and they also don't load any other drivers than what is absolutely necessary. So I'm faced with an incomplete operating system that doesn't recognize the monitor or ethernet card. And I can't load in the modules for these devices over the net, because it doesn't recognize the network card. It's a Catch-22.

The only solution now is a re-install. Spend a few weeks getting everything configured and then start over. Right. I've been here before. Way too often...

But if you're one of those folks considering moving away from RedHat/Fedora, beware. It's nice to be able to plop your disks into another box if the one you've got goes bad - and keep running. Debian won't do this. 

Just noticed a search hit landing on my website for 'crossroads BBS'. Wow. I'm impressed. That was about 25 years ago. Somebody obviously remembered and came looking and passed by all the links for a Crossroads BBS from Melbourne in the '90s so they must've known what they were looking for.

Howdy. 

We did have a fun little online community back then, although it was just ASCII text at 300/1200 baud. Joe remembers...

Hey computer! Who called today?

Read my mail, from Joe, since yesterday.  

Oh, and make me some coffee, wouldja' please?

Sometimes I wonder if we've moved forward at all... 

Tomorrow is Daylight Savings. Remember 'Spring forward, fall back'? That's right - tomorrow we move it forward, no matter how odd that may seem. It's October, but it's spring.

At least the Australian government hasn't been mucking with and tweaking DST as it did before the 2000 Olympics. The software engineers need time to code in the changes - I think that a lot of the world now has Sydney time right.

Well that would be anybody using the Olsen timezone databases. I know personally about thirty web services which just give you a choice of 'GMT+10' - and these are all going to be wrong tomorrow. On the bright side, I really don't care if they get it wrong. I'm not using any of them for anything globally time sensitive. It always makes my head hurt trying to figure out how many hours I'm going to be away from GMT with all the conversions and tweaks in effect. I suppose it'll probably be GMT+11. One hour forward. But wait, we'll then be one hour closer to Greenwhich, England as the earth spins. Not further from it. So maybe it's GMT+9. Silicon Valley will be... Uh, I give up. It's in negative GMT and the time is going back. So is it forward or backward? I'll have to figure it out on paper to work out the difference between LA (where this server is) and Sydney (close enough to where I am).  

But this will also give a good test of my own daylight savings and timezone functions (which use Olsen tables). The U.S. is going one hour back and we're going one hour forward. I might be poring over the code tomorrow if something gets askew.  

I spend a non-trivial amount of time keeping up with the latest and greatest in web development. In particular, I often find myself on websites where somebody is discussing Web2.0, social networking, etc. - and I often make comments. Many of these folks are downright hostile about me adding my viewpoint to the discussion, especially if it doesn't match their own viewpoint. (And don't dare write anything negative about Google.)  

Which made me look a bit closer. And most of these so-called web-2.0 'experts' are writing about the latest web technologies on a blogger or wordpress single-user weblog; otherwise known as a soapbox. Their formidable experience in social technology is limited to obtaining a facebook or myspace account. Few if any of them have ever actually written code.

So as always, when evaluating the opinions of experts, consider the source and determine the level of real expertise. There are a lot of so-called experts out there these days. Installing a WP blog and obtaining a MySpace account are not in themselves qualifications about anything more than an ability to install a software package and register for free accounts.

[As for my own qualifications, I don't claim to be an expert at anything.] 

If you're looking for a decent mid-range sound card and don't want to spend a fortune, the ESI Juli@ is pretty respectable. I really like the fact that it's about the cheapest card that'll provide balanced line. You do this by flipping the card around. Unbalanced connectors on one side, balanced on the other. It's a pretty neat concept.

Anyway, if you're trying to install one of these suckers on Vista, forget the installation CD. You can just throw it in the trash if you want. Even though the latest driver is for XP/2005, just go to the website and grab the latest. The driver on the install disk is a piece of crap and you'll be wondering why you bought such a sucky card. Can't even get the basic speaker test sounds to come out without about 300% signal distortion, dropouts, odd harmonics, etc. In short, the sound you get is almost totally unrecognizable.

The website driver makes it actually work.

Oh, and to use with Sonar, don't use the WDM channel. Just go with ASIO. 

This had me pulling my hair out yesterday, so I thought I'd share the experience with enough key terms that the next person pulling their hair out will find it.

I was installing my CMS software on a work machine. I'll likely be doing additional development on it, and the university is the best place to do this. But that's neither here nor there. My software is designed around 'clean URLs'; which means what you see in the URL bar isn't (usually) littered with code and operating system artifacts. So for instance to post to my weblog, I go to the URL /post/weblog, not something like post.php?op=weblog.

To accomplish this, I use an Apache webserver module called 'mod_rewrite', which takes care of the nitty details of this process. Mod_rewrite is not without its faults, but that's the subject of another article. It does the job. The biggest thing it does is let you leave out the '.php', except I'm letting it do a whole lot more.

Anyway I'll cut to the chase. My software was horribly broken after installing it yesterday. It took hours to figure out why. Something else was trying to provide clean URLs and strip '.php' from places where I actually needed to have it in order for things to work. Well that's not technically correct either. It was actually executing PHP files by URL without the extension. Except that these were 'include files'. They weren't meant to be executed directly. They were meant to be included in something else, and the something else was managed by mod_rewrite. The something else was never getting called. 

This was inconceivable. Nothing in any of the system release notes said anything about some magic new clean URL ability. This was on Debian (edge). Apache, PHP, MySQL. I tried all the sites. I googled for everything I could think of. Clean URL debian. Clean url apache. '.php not needed'. mod_rewrite. strip file extension. ForceType. (ForceType also lets you execute files without providing a filename extension). I scoured the last several months of Apache release notes, to no avail.

Finally after several hours I happened upon a little gem of a snippet on an obscure website. 'Turn on Multiviews instead of ForceType'. Debian has multiviews turned on by default, but this is the first I'd heard of it. I had assumed (never do this of course) that it was yet another fancy mod_dir option or something I didn't care about.

No. Multiviews is a slick trick for Apache that takes any pathname, and if it thinks it can find a page to return, it returns it. It uses the basename of the file in the URL and if there's no file, it looks for the filename with an extension. Any extension. Then it sends the file back. So it gives you a clean URL. You type in 'index' and it will send back 'index.htm' or 'index.html' or 'index.php' or 'index.pl' or 'index.shtml'. You get the idea. You can test this on any site that has multiviews turned on by asking for 'index' and see if you actually get a page. Normally you wouldn't. 

If the URL is 'post' and there's a file in the directory called 'post.php' it will send that file back even if you don't want it to. So I'll let you research it further if multiviews is what you want. It's actually pretty cool. In my case I had to disable it.

Options -Multiviews in the .htaccess did the trick and made everything work again.