Month: March 2007

not that easy

Apple technology

March 11, and the spring-forward Daylight Savings Times goes into effect earlier. Right now (0:11am pacific) my properly updated OS X 10.4.8 dashboard is showing the time for central europe 1 hour to early. Which is amusing since Apple did indeed update it’s operating system. The change in DST was initiated in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Four weeks more time shift. It might be that the upcoming confusion next week is more costly for the economy than those hours of sunlight during peoples waking hours save resources and therfor money.

The underlying systems, servers and services will do just fine with the change. We still have 31 years left to fix all the equipment that has a sense of time.

Looking in my crystal ball after it’s DST confusion has cleared up, I see allot of bad software working oddly. Millions of people shrugging their shoulder because their computers time is now off by one hour. Corporate support desks will have a busy monday. It’s really bad software and the interaction with human readable time where the change might cause troubles.

As crazy as it is, some people just buy a new computer next week, one that shows the time correctly. And of course there will be poster child snafus that the media will be all over. Some big corporation loosing millions because of a weird cascade of events, triggered by a pointless law.

I would be very surprised if this years DST change would go as smooth and seamless as the last ten did.

php5 without myql for fc4 php version and pcre library 6.6

linux

For historical reasons I run a Fedora core 4. It turns out that php5 is configured NOT to use mysql in this default install. Which is stupid, but what can you do?
Well, for starters you could follow: helpful howto.
The php source Version that it uses is 5.1.2. And it turns out that this is needed: Trying the current 5.2.1 resulted in

configure: error: The PCRE extension requires PCRE library version >= 6.6

In other words php 5.2.1 insists on having perl compatible regular expressions with a version number higher than 6.6. We ignore the fact that Perl Regular Expressions probably have not changed in the last ten years. So I am not sure why, -o- why, php 5.2 should now be insisting on a new Version.
Over at Centos there is a how to to get pcre 6.6 installed. Only problem is, that it does not fly on fedora core 4. To new for it I suppose.

So in the end I got php 5.1.2 from here and the beforementioned how to worked like a charm. Here my mirror of that specific php Version.

distro history

history linux technology

I am not a sysadmin. Ok, I adminstrate machine, but mostly so that I can go back and write some more horrible code. Coding for unix system is the most fun. I still remember when the Sun spark pizzabox showed up in the adjacent office and it came with a huge box of documentation: “They want you to know all this? Awesome!” On DOS PCs I was used to an environment where equipement makers would not share any knowledge.
After working on Intergraph work stations I then spent years with Irix. Which was nice at the time, since SGI had lots of money and even used some of it wisely. Of course the writing was on the wall. And running a web server on basically free hardware (except for electricity) was intruiging enough to try to deal with Linux. I am still trying to do that. Redhat was what came my way first. It worked ok, but at some point I got sick of rpm dependency stacks. Debian looked good with apt-get. So I built two boxes running that, and they drive me crazy. No chkconfig, ‘just’ use ‘sysv-rc-conf’. Once in a while I have to deal with Suse, but new machines I build with Fedora. Yum is pretty much making me happy these days. I simply don’t understand why somebody thought it would be a great idea to rename httpd to apache (or vice versa). And there are lots and lots of these differences. You don’t notice them when you stay with one system. But switching back and forth makes this annoying. Comes with the concept of free and open software I guess. But somebody I would like to have the cake and eat it too.

The quality of software is quiet interesting: the core of things seems to work really well for linux. Not so much ‘core’ as in ‘kernel’ but rather functionalities. The fringes, the configurations, the interface to adminstrate these things is pretty horrible. The babylonic /etc/init.d/ confusion is only one example. Another one would be that sar is by default off after you installed it on debian. You have to go into /etc/default/sysstat and enable it. Trickier to find than it should be.

fanta in 30 seconds

confessions of a pixel pusher

Many spots feel long and lost @ 30 seconds. this one does not