Tag Archives: open source

Alert: SpamAssassin’s Year 2010 Bug

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 – 9:17 pm
If you haven’t been getting as much email as usual this past week, the culprit may be SpamAssassin. It turns out that SpamAssassin 3.2.5 (the current version, released in June of 2008) has a Year 2010 Bug. The problem lies in the core configuration file 72_active.cf, which contains a wide variety of “currently active” rules. On line 543, [...]
By Kai MacTane | Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

OpenOffice Writer UX Warts

Monday, October 19th, 2009 – 10:30 am
The more I play with OpenOffice.org’s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning: When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do I [...]
By Kai MacTane | Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

So Why Isn’t Perl My Favorite Programming Language?

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 – 10:50 am
A good long while ago, I tried doing an exercise that I was considering making into a standard job interview question: “For each of your ‘languages of choice’, tell me 5 things you like about the language, and 5 things you dislike about it.” My languages of choice at the time were Perl, PHP, and [...]
By Kai MacTane | Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | Comments (1)

Eyeball-Deep in Legalese

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 – 5:37 pm

I used to not have a problem when I wanted to release software. I’d just release it under the GPL (what we’d now call the GPLv2), and be pretty happy with that decision.
Now there’s GPLv3, and I’m really uncertain whether I like it at all. I understand that Tivoization is a serious problem, but I [...]

By Kai MacTane | Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , | Comments (1)

Workaround for PEAR/PECL Failure with Message “ERROR: `phpize’ failed”

Monday, May 11th, 2009 – 10:24 am

When you try to upgrade or install various PEAR (or PECL) packages, you may get the rather unhelpful error message “ERROR: `phpize’ failed”. For example, here’s the result I get when I try to install the pecl_http package:
root@finrod:~# pecl install pecl_http
pecl/pecl_http can optionally use PHP extension "iconv"
downloading pecl_http-1.6.3.tar ...
Starting to download pecl_http-1.6.3.tar (Unknown size)
................................................................................
................................................................................
.........................................done: 1,015,808 [...]

By Kai MacTane | Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (12)

When Have You Accomplished Enough?

Sunday, May 10th, 2009 – 5:36 pm

Okay, let me see if I can take stock of the day:
I started off by getting my /etc, /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin, and /var/named directories under version control. That’s good. Plus I think I’ve got things set up to where I can upgrade WordPress plugins on my local setup, then reliably push the changes through version [...]

By Kai MacTane | Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)