The new balance

The latest incarnation of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn 7.04 does not include PHP4. That's fine for most of the world, who should be using PHP5 anyway. But for the bunch of use who would like to enjoy all the benefits of Feisty on their production machine whilst still being able to code for web hosts who are still running PHP4 (there are many), this might be the solution.

This setup is similar to some of the "run PHP5 as a module, run PHP4 as a CGI" setups, except that I'm using FastCGI to wrap the PHP4 CGI binary. I only use PHP for the web, so I have not installed any of the packages non-essential for this task. Additionally, I have not bothered at this stage to set up a PHP5 enabled directory. If you want to do both at the same time, you'll have to look elsewhere. I'm not using PHP5 for the web very much at the moment.

One word of warning. This works for me. It may not work for you. In addition, it requires installing packages which are not even maintained for Feisty any more, let alone supported. It may possibly cause you problems in the future with packages that are written for PHP5 on Apache and are installed on your system, and which are then run with PHP4. An example of this is phpMyAdmin, which depends on PHP5, now, but still seems to run fine on PHP4 as a CGI. Be aware that it may be upgraded and lose PHP4 support in the future!

The setup steps come after the break. Read More

I thought rather than damn it straight away, I ought to give Second Life a chance. My tolerance for these sorts of things is quite low, although I did try Digital Space Traveller back in the day. Well, anyway, it is the pit of sin and villainy I expected, but has a very flexible interface. The idea of building new game objects whilst in-game is clearly absorbing. I don't imagine I will log in very often, and I certainly won't pay monthly for "land" in-game, but nevertheless, if anyone wants to meet in one of the less offensive parts of the game world, I'd be glad to load up the linux client again, which seems to work surprisingly well. There is the odd crash, but it seems smoother than the Windows version. My game name is Merves DeCuir.


<Axe> I

<Axe> do

<Axe> not

<Axe> know

<Axe> where

<Axe> family

<Axe> doctors

<Axe> acquired

<Axe> illegibly

<Axe> perplexing

<Axe> handwriting;

<Axe> nevertheless,

<Axe> extraordinary

<Axe> pharmaceutical

<Axe> intellectuality,

<Axe> counterbalancing

<Axe> indecipherability,

<Axe> transcendentalizes

<Axe> intercommunications'

<Axe> incomprehensibleness.

<JediHobbes> woah

<JediHobbes> blinks


http://www.bash.org/?406381

I'm pleased to say that I received a letter from First Great Western in response to my complaint letter, which didn't seem too boilerplate, but was unsigned. As a "goodwill" gesture, they enclosed a voucher for £20. I rarely make a journey that expensive, though, and they don't give change, but it is appreciated nonetheless.

I'm a heavy PHP user, and enjoy being able to write for multiple environments: the CLI, the web and OOP into the mix. I know there are things like Winbinder and GTK but it would be nice if there was a platform-agnostic method for GUI development that didn't involve compilation and allowed for portable scripting. Any ideas? I'm happy to use any language so long as it meets my requirements for bazaar-style throw-together coding and prototyping and doesn't rely on any particular IDE.

Answers on a postcard, I suppose (or in the comments, more usefully!) In the meanwhile, I'll get on with trying out the GTK bindings.

Most linux systems with the Perl language installed also have the 'rename' command. This is very handy for renaming groups of files so that they are consistent: an example would be sorting out your audio file collection and having the tracks named "artist - trackname.ogg" or similar. If you had previously got your tracks named "artist-album-trackname.OGG", you could use the rename command to sort them out on a per-album basis.

I just thought I'd jot a note to help people who needed to append or prepend to a track name (and for my own future reference!). I had made a mistake and done this to some Incognito tracks (yeah, soul, brother!):



$ rename 's/\d\d - //'


This had had the effect (of course) of renaming the tracks to remove two digits from the beginning, and I had wanted to put "Incognito" there instead! Sadly, I didn't know enough about Perl regular expressions to get myself out of this mess. All the tracks in the folder were called "trackname.ogg". I wanted "artist - trackname.ogg". This, as I discovered was the answer:


$ rename 's/()/Incognito - $1/'


Those brackets are really just to create a group of characters to be dealt with together. What they also do is create what is called a "backreference": a variable containing the text that matches. Putting nothing in the brackets causes everything to be matched, interestingly, so that's the whole filename! To refer to the backreference, you simply count how many backreferences you have used (from 1, not 0) and use $thatnumber, so note the $1 later on.

Of course, the moral of the story is use the -n switch more! That tells rename not to actually make the changes, but to show you what will happen to each affected file.

It isn't like me to complain, at least officially, but today's train journey caused me to see the worth of writing this one. Read on after the jump. Might post the response, too.

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