Microsoft on installing PHP and Perl

On their "get the facts" site (as if), Microsoft recently posted a set of screencast demonstrating how much "easier" it is to install Perl and PHP on IIS than it is on Linux.

Being bored, I had a look at these screencasts. The first covered installing stuff on Windows; in a 5 minute screencast, they first explain how you install ActivePerl, and have it handle perl scripts for a webserver through a CGI interface. This involves way too many steps to remember for me (including clicking through a wizard, going to the IIS management interface and enabling it, creating a directory and enabling that in the IIS interface as a CGI location, and more).

Next, they do the same for PHP. Since they install PHP as a CGI binary rather than an ISAPI module, the setup isn't as complex—they conveniently reused many of the settings they'd done for perl—but it still required quite some steps.

After having watched this screencast, I was wondering how they'd make it look harder on a Linux system. My guess was that they'd use Slackware and would compile apache, perl, and php from scratch or some such.

That didn't turn out to be the case, however. They used ubuntu.

To make the process look complicated, they refrained from using synaptic, instead opening an (almost full-screen) shell window, in which they use apt-get to install the libapache2-mod-php5 package. They conveniently also first installed the wrong version of apache, so that it would do all kinds of magical and confusing things. Really, however, after having installed this package, everything works—and they show that.

The perl step should have been ignored. After installing apache on Debian or any of its derivatives, such as Ubuntu, support for Perl CGI scripts has already been installed and configured. Configuring that requires exactly zero steps. However, they still install libapache2-mod-perl, just to make it look a bit more confusing. It's not a very bad idea to do this, actually; installing mod_perl makes serving Perl scripts go quite a bit faster. But if you just want to have apache serve perl through CGI scripts, as they'd done on the IIS setup, all you need to do is install ubuntu, and make sure there's an apache installed. Period.

But that's not all. They cheat. The installation of the perl and php modules on ubuntu includes the process of downloading the binaries and their dependencies; on the Windows screencast, the downloads have already been performed, and are placed on the desktop. This nicely avoids showing how you need to go to the ActivePerl and PHP websites, track down installers, download them, wait for your download to complete, and then manually start the installation process.

To make things even more laughable, they install Perl and PHP as CGI handlers on Windows, but perform an installation of the same software through apache's C API. In other words, they told you how to install a fast and useful Linux system, and how to install a slow and less useful Windows installation (since a PHP setup that uses CGI will not support sessions or persistent database connections, amongst other things).

And even with all that cheating and blundering, the Windows screencast still takes 5 minutes, as compared to the four for Ubuntu.

I think Mahatma Gandhi forgot one line in his famous quote. It should have this:

Then they make complete and utter fools of themselves in a vain attempt to still look relevant

... right before the "then you win".

Pathetic

When you're 5, you're living with your parents. If not, you're probably in an orphanage, waiting for adoptive parents.

When you're 10, you're living with your parents. If you're not, something is very wrong.

When you're 15, you're living with your parents—although you'd probably rather live elsewhere.

When you're 20, you're most likely still living with your parents; but if you don't, that's nothing to be ashamed of.

When you're 25, you've either moved out, are doing so, or are thinking about it.

When you're 30 and you still live with your parents, you're pathetic.

At least that's the way I look at it.

As of today, I'm officially pathetic.

Won't be for long, though—it's just taking slightly longer than initially expected to make the appartment habitable. Stuff left to do:

• Attach some plaster to one wall, closing the holes in it
• Paint that wall, and one other which had to be treated for water damage first
• Finish up the kitchen: attach doors, connect electricity, glue everything together, attach baseboards
• Close water pipe shafts again
• Actually move in

Except for the "connect electricity" bit and the final step, that should all be doable in about a day, if I hurry.

It's about time.

New lens

As a sort of birthday present to $SELF, I got myself a new lens for my camera yesterday. Well, new—it was a a second-hand lens. In Merksem, apparently there's a photography shop that sells second-hand photography material; so I sold them my 18-55mm lens which was the kit lens of my Nikon D50 (I also have a 18-70mm one which outperforms the 18-55mm in all aspects except weight), and got me a Sigma 28-300mm (f/3.5-6.3) for about €150. That's before subtracting the €25 that I got for the 18-55mm.

The new lens isn't better than the 18-70mm in all aspects (it's not very good for objects close to the camera), but it's a good tele zoom.

So today, with this great weather, I went to the nearby nature area of the "Oude Landen", and tried out the new lens.

I love it.

Really.

Referer logs

I did this three years ago, too. I guess now's the time to go again: I just went through my referer logs—specifically, keywords people entered in search engines right before they ended up on my site—, and will try to answer those questions people seem to have when they end up on my site. Here goes:

• voorwoord eindwerk: Eh. How about you make your homework yourself? (to my english readers: "voorwoord eindwerk" is dutch for "foreword dissertation"... and a few months ago, I noticed that I accidentally had my brother's dissertation on my website. It's now removed, and the search hits seem to have stopped, too, but it's still in my not-so-recent referer logs)
• php accept language: Yes, I did write that. By the number of people searching for it, you'd think it's the most important contribution I made to open source. I sure hope not, but anyway.
• wouter verhelst: Yes, you found him, all 1.4% of you. Perhaps you meant that other wouter verhelst, however.
• digikam vs f-spot/f-spot vs digikam: I eventually picked digikam, not f-spot. Make sure you pick the right one from the beginning, though, since switching currently requires you to re-tag everything.
• nicknames: My IRC nickname is 'Yoe'. But as I've explained before, I prefer not being called that elsewhere.
• vim vs emacs: Not sure why you end up on my site for that. I use both, depending on what I want or need to do. (emacs is more powerful in some areas, but takes far longer to start...)
• duck with whisky:yes, yes, yes, very funny.
• nbdmagic: The NBD protocol uses a magic number to mark the start of a request packet; this defends against the client and server getting out of sync (which may happen in case of a bug somewhere). If that happens, the server will kill the connection with a message "Not enough magic." Please report the bug, or (even better) fix it

Moving further down, it's fascinating to see what people were looking for when they ended up on my site. Some of the below, I have absolutely no clue what happened...:

• belgium driver licence—go to your local municipal office, please!
• sockets in brainfuck—now, really.
• wouter's mum—look at your own, you dammit you!
• what to do with debian—I should know, how?
• several things related to "android"—I'm not involved in that
• list of programming languages to learn—that's easy: the list of programming languages you don't know, yet.
• kernel panic not syncing aiee killing interrupt handler 2.6.24 (and several other literal panic messages)
• verhelst -meaning—In other words: "anything that has verhelst, but no meaning". Thanks. I guess.

I guess blogging about technical things for several years has made me "interesting" enough for some people. Grin.

Long live the NMBS

When an emergency occurs in a critical piece of your infrastructure, problems are to be expected. I don't think anyone can argue with that. If you do have a piece of infrastructure so critical that the use of your services all over the country will be affected by it not being there anymore, you'll want to have emergency procedures in place; one of these procedures could be having a backup copy of your infrastructure standing by, allowing it to take over should the primary break down. If you have multiple instances of almost-but-not-quite the same thing, allowing another instance of said thing to take over your functioning should you break down might be a good idea, too. If the emergency that sparks the problem in the first place turns out to be "fire", it might be a good idea to investigate your infrastructure for fire safety; you wouldn't want the same thing to happen all over again in te near future on a different site.

And if things go really bad, you will want to inform your users as much as humanly possible: in today's day and age, that would include posting something on your website, even if that's only reference to a phone number which people can call for more information.

Welcome to the real world. Long live the NMBS... Not.

Last year or so, some critical piece of infrastructure in the Brussels South trainstation burned down. As a result, trains were delayed and often cancelled for months afterwards. This clearly shows they did not have any emergency procedures in place; if they did, train services would have returned to normal after, at most, a few days. Granted, the piece of infrastructure that burned down last year was a power transfer station, which might be hard to replace, but still.

Today, another fire burned down another piece of infrastructure; this time, it was the signalling station in Brussels North. The fire itself occurred around 16:30, and from 17:30 onwards, not a single train could enter or leave Brussels anymore. Right now, more than 7 hours later, it is still impossible to get from or to Brussels. Even here, in Mechelen, it seems impossible to get to Antwerp—the opposite site, but because almost all trains to Antwerp come from Brussels, well...

And of course, the NMBS website mentions none of this. The only thing it mentions is the fact that there are "extra trains to the coast", because of the hot weather. As if anyone would be interested in taking the train right now...

Huge companies. A PITA, that's what they are.

Geekdinner

Another interesting geekdinner last night. Since Bart had offered to do some cooking, I offered to do the desert: my favourite, waffles.

Unfortunately, Bart kindof misunderstood me, and when he decided that there were too many people for him to cook, he decided that there weren't too many people for me to make waffles. Grunt. Also, he didn't really follow my instructions in buying the ingredients, so I had to improvise a bit. All in all, I think it's safe to say the waffles were a success, so that's okay then, I guess.

Anyway, going home was a bit of an adventure...

23:40(ish) – step in the car, leave Paal

00:15 – arrive at Cambio car's home, check out.

00:35 – take train to Antwerp Central station

00:40 – arrive at Antwerp Central, walk to Rooseveltplaats

00:30 – final bus of the evening left home

00:45 – arrive at Rooseveltplaats, decide to walk home, because a taxi is too damn expensive.

02:35 – arrive home, hit the sack.

07:45(ish) – wake up

I hate my biological clock. I really do.