David Gessel
PHP, Pear, pspell and a core dump
I’ve been getting core dumps from HTTPD since doing an update which included PHP. This happened to me before and I thought I’d try the same solution again, but it didn’t work. Pear was due an update portupgrade -ra would get to the update and error out. Attempting manually force it was a dead end:
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Console_Getopt-1.2.2
install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Structures_Graph-1.0.2
*** Signal 11
Couldn’t find any help on pear.php.net except to say it was a PHP problem. That seemed more likely when I found that
# php -v
yielded
segmentation fault (core dumped)
Many fingers point to ZEND, and a few to recode.so but one pointed to pspell.so
I deleted that line from my .../etc/php/extensions.ini and voila:
claudel# php -v
PHP 5.2.5 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Apr 5 2008 16:51:20)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies
I recompiled all the whole PHP dependency tree with -O2 and still it works fine and I could update pear right to 1.7.1
snow in Toronto:
Winter is finally basically over, but this is really what the snow looked like in the dead of winter – snowbanks literally several stories high.
Some good news in the world
First, UAL has done two things that are quite good:
- The ORD RCC’s former smoking room is now the “quiet room” with big barred out cell phone logos. It is quiet, and very pleasant.
- T-Mobile is FREE at the RCC. FREE! Finally. I’ve been hassling UAL through 1kvoice etc. and the RCC comment cards since about 2001 – long before they even had T-Mobile – to provide free 802.11 to their members. Other clubs do. They got into this big provisioning contract with T-Mobile (or something) and years of comments went no where. It has been about 5 years, maybe the contract is up, but for whatever reason finally there is free WiFi at the RCC. Yay!
Truecrypt 5.1a supports sleep mode! YAY! 5.0 did not, it would crash entering sleep mode. It’s a cool thing, but crashing isn’t. I like the idea that if my laptop is stolen, my info is very likely secure, but not so much so that I can live without sleep mode, even risking a freezy RAM-cicle recovery. I sleep it getting on and off planes all the time and now I can. I’m very happy with this release.
Truecrypt finally died or got shut down or something, but VeraCrypt took the code and ran with it.
Crash on Foothill
Canadian accident
Snowy Toronto
I’ve been going to Toronto every week. And every week it snows. Usually my flights are delayed, many times I get to the airport and it is clear and while I’m waiting the storm moves in and the cancellations cascade.
So far there has been 189.6 cm of snow here, putting this winter in 4th place in Toronto history. But tonight it snowed again, at least a cm, and that’d put us in 3rd place overtaking 190.6cm. The record was set in the winter of 1938-39: 207.4cm.
Winter in Canada
My job takes me to Canada every week lately. It’s always an adventure in the winter, but I haven’t been here absent a snow storm in weeks. Apparently this is the snowiest February in 117 years. Yay.
Snowstorm
Back at yyz and yet another snowstorm.
Calendar Syncing
Like many people, I have to use Outlook. It is by far not my favorite email or calendar system; I use Mulberry personally because it does not suck at all and it has a cool calendar I can use offline. I haven’t quite figured out my own webdav server, so I use Google Calendar to keep track of shared events with my girlfriends and others in my life. And everyone can use Google calendar and it does not suck either, so there’s no reason not to.
But it does create a sync issue. One which can be solved with free software and services by the following fine providers:
I end up using Google as my shared hub, sort of. Technically scheduleworld.com is the hub, but it’s invisible to everyone but me. To get there I use the Funambol outlook plug-in to sync my outlook calendar with scheduleworld.com (following these directions). It is not able to sync directly to Google yet because Google has to do it their way. Fortunately the clever man behind scheduleworld has that figured out. I also sync contacts using funambol to scheduleworld, but Google borked the contact API and so they don’t make it to Google Contacts from scheduleworld any more: scheduleworld does have an LDAP server though.
On the well-designed side, I use gcal daemon to sync my Mulberry calendars with Google (my directions here). I also subscribe to the scheduleworld LDAP server from Mulberry so I can access my outlook contacts from mulberry.
Now, oddly, Outlook’s contact databases are painfully borked and the local address book and global address books do not collaborate at all. Stupid. Unfortunately neither does Mulberry offer an option to sync the local address book to one or more remote LDAP directories, which would be very useful. I think there is still an odd disconnect on the part of developers who tend to work stationary and assume everyone has an always-on connection with very rare moments of disconnect, but as someone who gets on at least 4 planes a week can attest: this is not always the case. Even Mulberry, which is the only IMAP client I’ve found that supports a workable disconnected mode, does not make frequently disconnected mode trivial to use – neither to keep IMAP mailboxes in sync nor to provide off-line lookup of LDAP databases.
But Cyrus is responsive and I am optimistic we might, someday, have a good solution. If not, Adobe Air is pointing the way toward a viable seamless connected/disconnected (or periodically disconnected) world. I think this will become increasingly essential as the world goes to frequently interrupted wireless connectivity. Currently we tolerate wireless (WAN) interruptions because we have to, but that rules out far too much of what we’d like to be able to do and solutions thus far are generaly ad-hoc. We need an imperfect WAN connected world that is perceptively as relaible as a wired one.