`Departed' stays put, `Flags' flagging
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Timing isn't everything when it comes to the Academy Awards &#151; but it helps.
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This might be a big geeky but my favorite UNIX directory is /etc.  Whats yours? /proc? /usr/local is pretty good?  There always good stuff in /var!  What about /tmp?
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The other day I blogged about setting up SSH proxies .    It turns out this is only 90% correct. You need to specify a timeout for the 'nc' command or they will block forever on your proxy machine and then you'll run out of processes.  The new command is   "nc -w 60 %h %p "  Notice the -w 60... this tells us to timeout after 60 seconds.  Normal SSH connections won't ever timeout until you logout.  Then 60 seconds later the 'nc' command will quit on the server.
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In recent work, Ian Selby came across something odd - a setup where PHP was segfaulting without any real indication of where the error might be:   Starting to get a little frustrated, I took a peek at my error logs (/var/log/httpd/error_log for the unitiated), and discovered a wonderful message [about the segfault]. As any person scratching their head would do, I hit up google.. to no real avail. Just a bunch of php bug reports. So, what happened, and how did I fix it?   After searching through the code and narrowing down where it could be, the culprit looked like a custom session handler he was using. It uses MySQL to store the sesion information and, unfortunately, when Ian had compiled the server he didn't let PHP know about his unique setup.   His default installation was trying to use the default MySQL information (including the socket) to reach the database. Obviously failing, the server simply gave up and segfaulted. Thankfully, all it takes it a recompile with a few extra parameters and you're back in business.
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com September 22, 2004, 12:09 PM PT. OS Migration has moved to the bottom ranks after making its mark on IT Professional&#39;s top five priority last year.
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com October 19, 2004, 4:16 PM PT. With most organizations that planned to move already moved to Microsoft Server 2003, OS migration has dropped to the bottom ranks after making
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Mark Martin needed an earlier yellow flag. "Nobody wants to see a grown man cry, all right?" sighed Martin. "That's what it is. And I'm not going to cry about it. This is what it is, and that's it. Their decision. They made the decision, and that's what we're going to live with."
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ICANN officially retires the .yu domain and assigns .rs to Serbia and .me to Montenegro. In this case the delay was political, not technical.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.   Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.   He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.   I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.
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Many corporations today employ multiple techniques to protect against data loss. Unfortunately, the various approaches are often applied and managed in an uncoordinated manner. Ironically, the nightly backup, for some critical classes of applications, becomes almost irrelevant, representing a tertiary, "last ditch" level of data protection.
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According to this posting on the SecWatch board today, there are some issues with the CJ Tag Board software that allow for code injection issues.   Multiple input validation vulnerabilities in CJ Tag Board have been reported, which can be exploited by remote users to compromise a vulnerable system.   The issue comes from improperly filtered user input for the "User-Agent" HTTP header and the "banned" parameter for the admin side. This issue effects CJ Tag Board version 3.0. No update or patch has been posted as of yet to correct this issue.
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A new release of the Zip PECL package has been made according to this post on Pierre-Alain Joye's blog today. The main update in this release is to counteract a Windows bug that's interfering with binary file opens.   The issue is actually a windows bug. No matter if I give or not the "b" flag to fopen, the write operations are not binary safe. It seems to be a known issue as many projects use the same trick.   The problem comes up when PHP forces the binary mode in SAPI and CLI, making the binary writes to a file non-binary safe no matter what. Pierre is also asking for help from anyone out there with any information/bug reports/references about this issue that would yield something useful.
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Cal Evans came up against a problem earlier in his development work - issues when he was trying to get his old include path.   What you SHOULD get back is a string describing your old include path. If you get false, you have hit the problem I hit last night. I went so far as to recompile 2 difference versions of Apache thinking (almost correctly) that it was something that had changed in my Apache config files.   If you're one of the "falsers" out there, check out the rest of his post of his solution around the problem. His problem stemmed from his trying to reassign a php_admin_value (instead of php_value where the script could override it) setting, specifically the one for the include_path.    He also points out that Zend Framework users might keep an eye out for this problem too as the Zend_Loader package changes the include path at times.
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QUESTION: What is the best approach to protecting me from ID theft and related activities? Will a software package work best, or must I go to a hardware firewall?
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Lorenzo Alberton has posted some updates about the PEAR packages that he maintains to his blog today including MDB_QueryTool, Mail_Queue2, MDB2, and Translation2.   Even if lately I've been coding way more in C/C++ than in PHP, I still keep an eye on PEAR developement: I reckon in the last month I've closed a bug a day, on average. And after my last call for help about my PEAR packages, I'm also pleased to announce that someone did indeed offer a hand. I'm happy to welcome not one, but two new developers!   Each of the items has links to their PEAR homepage and a few quick words on where the package stands (including developers involved or wanting to get involved). He also reminds developers out there that they can help out too if they want to jump in and get into PEAR.
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Just two days before it was to&#160;end support for Netscape Navigator,&#160;on Wednesday AOL gave the browser a last-minute reprieve, saying it would extend support until March 1.At the end of December, Tom Drapeau, the director of AOL&#39;s Netscape brand, surprised users when he stopped development of the browser and set Feb. 1 as the date when his team would stop issuing security updates.Yesterday, Drapeau pushed out the support end date a full month, saying that Netscape and its partners needed more time to wrap up work on tools designed to help users migrate to the Mozilla Firefox or Flock browsers.&quot;Mozilla, Flock, and AOL are working together to provide tools to ease the migration of existing Netscape browser users to our recommended Flock and Firefox alternatives,&quot; said Drapeau in an explanatory post to the Netscape blog. &quot;AOL support for Netscape browsers has been extended one month, to March 1.&quot;In addition, an upgrade will be issued to Netscape 9 users through the browser&#39;s integrated update feature to &quot;streamline the process of choosing from these two great browser alternatives,&quot; Drapeau said.Flock was a new recommendation from Drapeau, who last month cited only Firefox -- the code successor to Navigator -- as an alternative, but Flock had been touted by others on the Netscape team earlier this month. Flock, a free browser that stresses social networking features, is built on the Firefox code base.Drapeau didn&#39;t specify what tools were in the works, but presumably they will include some kind of Netscape-to-Firefox migration assistant. Currently, the only way to move a user profile from the former to the latter is to manually copy the Netscape &quot;profiles.ini&quot; file and its folder to Firefox&#39;s directory. Flock, on the other hand, recently unveiled version 1.06, which includes Netscape migration features.Nor did Drapeau elaborate on the reasons for Netscape&#39;s demise. In December, he named &quot;AOL&#39;s current business focus&quot; and an inability to revive Navigator&#39;s moribund market share as motivators for the move. At the time, however, sources close to Netscape called out AOL upper management&#39;s lack of interest and funding as the real reason why Drapeau pulled the plug.According to one source, the lack of resources meant &quot;we would not have been able to offer releases in a timely manner, which would have been a disservice to the brand as well as the end user.&quot;Coincidentally, Mozilla celebrated its 10th anniversary just last Tuesday, Jan. 22. Several months before it was acquired by AOL, Netscape Communications Corp. in early 1998 announced it would release the browser&#39;s source code, a move that led several weeks later to the formation of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and eventually the creation of Firefox.Last month, Asa Dotzler, currently Mozilla&#39;s company&#39;s director of community development, and one of the first paid employees of the Mozilla Foundation, said good riddance to Netscape on hearing Drapeau&#39;s news. &quot;I&#39;m glad that sad beast has finally been put down,&quot; Dotzler said in a post to his blog. He also didn&#39;t buy Drapeau&#39;s explanation for putting Netscape to rest.&quot;The real truth is probably closer to &#39;we weren&#39;t building a compelling enough product to be able use it to bring users to our ad-supported world and it doesn&#39;t make sense spending more on browser development than we recoup in increased ad revenue as a result of that browser work&#39;,&quot; said Dotzler.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Nice blog post via Slava  criticizing the quality of the Java runtime and hotspot compiler:  "The HotSpot source code is a bad joke We wasted an afternoon and had a good laugh on IRC today, looking over parts of the SCSL sources to HotSpot and the sun.* classes. I can't give too much detail or paste code samples because that would violate Sun's ... license, but here are some highlights:"  This is my favorite one:  "A lot of preprocessors are used. This includes a mix of awk, sed, shell scripts, and indeed, Scheme! Yes, the JVM source includes jscheme.jar, used to generate some CORBA classes. Considering that Sun talks about how bad preprocessors are, its hypocritical of them to use preproces ...