chris's blog

Why don't we stop using incandescent light bulbs?

Posted June 18, 2008 - 3:34pm by chris

Last year, Australia became the first country to announce it would ban the use of incandescent bulbs by 2010. California is planning a phase-out by 2018. And on Tuesday, New Zealand said it would join the fray, ending the use of traditional lightbulbs starting in October 2009. Now Europe is talking about doing the same.

JavaScript becomes the thick-client environment

Posted June 17, 2008 - 11:33am by chris

As I wrote quite a while back, there seems to be a convergence on open-source technologies that will enable all the old-school thick-client desktop applications and their nice interfaces, and much more for new applications. Now Apple has demonstrated a use and commitment to a JavaScript framework known as SproutCore which further pushes the state of the art in that direction.

Updating PEAR on Mac OS X Tiger

Posted March 14, 2008 - 8:21am by chris

Do you have a Mac still running Tiger (Mac OS 10.4)? And did you recently decide to install a PEAR component for use with some PHP? And lastly, did it fail with some cryptic HTTP error "410 Gone" that you had very little luck finding with Google? I did.

The solution is a bunch of steps backward and then forward again. Unfortunately, it's not very clear to the perhaps large number of Mac users who did not keep their PEAR libraries up to date all along on Tiger. But the answer is here, at the moment (it will scroll off when more news is added): http://pear.php.net/

Making 1and1 More Secure

Posted February 12, 2008 - 11:30am by chris

I run a couple of Drupal sites on 1and1 for historical reasons (3 years free). A while ago, I dutifully upgraded them to Drupal 5.7. And was surprised to find that PHP's register_globals was enabled.

All this time, I've been running with a .htaccess file which explicitly disabled that setting -- if 1and1's Apache was running mod_php only, it turns out. Apparently, such PHP settings in .htaccess files don't do anything if running PHP in CGI mode.

Software category

Posted February 4, 2008 - 4:10am by chris

Some day (soon, I hope), I will have some open source software I authored posted here. It just needs cleaning up, packaging, licenses, SVN links, etc.

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