Mokka mit Schlag » Web Development

This site and the other sites hosted on the same Mac Mini (The Cafes,www.xom.nu) were down for about half an hour early this morning.They’re fixed now. The problem was interesting. I was hacking the httpd.conf file to add a new virtual host and I was convinced I’d made a serious error, and I racked my brains trying to spot it. I backed out my changes and the problem still wasn’t fixed. I reverted to backups and the problem wasn’t fixed.

The eventual clue that led me to realize what was happening was that sometimes I’d get weird usage messages from httpd and apachectl. This site is served by Apache 2.0. However Mac OS X ships with Apache 1.3, and that had snuck into my path. I had managed to launch the bundled Apache 1.3 on top of or instead of Apache 2.0, so it was reading different config files completely. For some reason, I couldn’t shut it down. The dual versions were confusing both binaries. I had to restart, but then Apache 2.0 launched and all was goodness.

To avoid this problem in the future, I’m going to rename /usr/sbin/httpd to something less likely to surprise me.

The upside is that once I get this all fixed, I should have some very cool new features I’ve been promising for years, and may finally get working later this weekend. Watch this space.

There seems to be a small epidemic of blog spam coming in from apparently Polish sites. The comments take a variety of forms, but usually look something like this:

Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work. Greetings

Sometimes they ask for permission to translate the article into Polish.

You may want to keep an eye out for these. Akismet seems to be missing a lot of them, and at first glance they seem like a real comment. However Googling some of the phrases makes it apparent that they’re spam. The exact wording varies.

My PHP error logs are filling up with errors like this one:

[05-May-2007 06:11:56] PHP Notice: Undefined variable: livePreviewDivAdded in /var/www/thecafes/wp-content/plugins/live-comment-preview.php on line 24

so I decided to see if I could fix it. I think the problem is this line:

$livePreviewDivAdded == false;

I’m using this post to test that.

I guess Microsoft didn’t read this article. Silverlight will run on the Mac but can’t be authored there. This means at least half the people who might think about developing for it won’t be able to.
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On the advice of numerous people I’ve installed WP-Cache here on Mokka mit Schlag. It’s supposed to dramatically speed up performance by caching query responses while still allowing for live comments and editing and all that yummy fired goodness WordPress is famous for. We shall see. If it makes a noticeable difference, I’ll install it on The Cafes too.
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