Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Emergency Phones on campus

I'm sure I have a rant on this somewhere, but quite frankly I don't have the energy to find it. Lets just say that this topic consumed a large part of my day today.

posted by guy at: 22:39 SAST | path: /issues | permanent link

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Engaged

I don't, as a rule, post personal stuff to this blog. This is the first exception to this rule, but it's something big and important and worth breaking the rules a bit for.

Over the last weekend, Mici and I went to Lesotho on holiday together. Unbeknownst to her, I had more plans ;-)

On Monday 23 August, I proposed to her while hiking down the Pitseng Gorge, just South of Malealea Lodge in Lesotho. She said yes, much to my relief (I was really, really nervous), so Mici and I are engaged.

We don't know things like dates, etc yet, since it depends on when my parents can come down from Zimbabwe, and when Mici's dad has recovered from his recent op.

There are some photos of our holiday, and of the place I proposed.

posted by guy at: 16:30 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Time

The last five days have been interesting, both from a social and professional perspective. Unfortunately they've also been horribly busy and look set to continue that way until the end of the week. This means I have no time. Which sucks. It also explains the lack of information here.

A few of these around campus would be nice.

posted by guy at: 23:15 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

PHP 4.3.8

This is for those of you who both use FreeBSD and haven't yet upgraded to PHP 4.3.8 (or are sitting at 4.3.8_1). It is posted in the hopes that I save someone else the aggrivation I went through.

There are several changes to the way FreeBSD's lang/php4 port works starting from version 4.3.8. The most significant is that PHP changes from a single static module to a bunch of dynamically loaded objects. You used to configure your build options in lang/php4 port, but these have now been seperated to a new lang/php4-extensions port. Each of the extensions (for example, mysql) lives in a port of it's own (eg databases/php4-mysql). The lang/php4-extensions port is simply a meta port that provides you with a nice config interface and brings all these little ports together.

The advantages of this should be immediately apparent. You no longer need to rebuild all of PHP to get an extension. The caveats aren't so apparent.

The changes between 4.3.7 and 4.3.8 are quite well documented in /usr/ports/UPDATING, and being a good ports updater, you should read that. It says:

 20040719:
  AFFECTS: users of PHP
  AUTHOR: ale@FreeBSD.org

  The old lang/php4 and lang/php5 ports have been splitted into 'base' PHP,
  PEAR, and shared extensions to allow more flexibility and add new features.
  Upgrading your current PHP installation will result in a 'base' PHP
  installation (no PEAR and no extensions).
  PEAR can be found in the new devel/php4-pear and devel/php5-pear ports, while
  the set of PHP extensions to install can be choosen via the meta-ports
  lang/php4-extensions and lang/php5-extensions, or installing singular
  extensions individually.
  If you have a previous php.ini configuration file, be sure to comment out
  the extension_dir parameter, since the correct path is statically compiled
  into the PHP binary.
  For an overview of the modules used with the old PHP binary, use
  the command "php -m".

Useful things to know include the fact that there is now a php.conf in ${PREFIX}/etc which, amongst other things, specifies where your extensions live. You can safely comment the extension_dir option in your php.ini as php.conf will tell PHP where to find it (its compiled in I suspect :)

What wasn't well documented (and fscking irritaing) was the changes between the 4.3.8_1 port and the 4.3.8_2 ports. I did a portupgrade and everything broke for no apparent reason. My error logs complained about duplicate definitions of functions.

I originally thought I'd built a static binary and spent ages trying to work out *how* I had done this. I couldn't.

In desperation, I appealed to the source and discovered a small but highly significant change. The --with-config-file-scan-dir=${PREFIX}/etc/php configure option means that PHP looks in another place for it's config files in addition to the normal ${PREFIX}/php.ini

One of the files in this new ${PREFIX}/etc/php/ directory is called extensions.ini, which is where lang/php4-extensions and its friends document their existence. In other words, my duplicates were because I had identical extension lines in both php.ini and php/extensions.ini

The solution, once you know this is simple. Remove all the extension options from php.ini

Note that if you go straight from 4.3.7 to 4.3.8_2 you won't have this problem. It'll seamlessly just work. That helps add to the confusion when you're upgrading multiple machines *grr*

posted by guy at: 22:30 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Proverb

The following was printed on a Stanford year-in-review DVD that crossed my desk today. It seemed quite profound and worth sharing:

If you are planning for a year, sow rice;
If you are planning for a decade, plant trees;
If you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
        — Chinese proverb

Update: 2004/08/03.19h54

I've just watched the DVD. These people really have the right idea about how technology can and should be used in education, both at the University adn school levels. We can learn a lot from them. I'll have to make sure the DVD ends up at the right sort of place within the 'varsity.

posted by guy at: 11:47 SAST | path: /general | permanent link