SpaceX

So on the fourth attempt, SpaceX have successfully launched Falcon 1 into orbit. It really marks a significant change as mankind no longer needs government funding or direct military application to build a rocket and put payload into orbit.

I look forward to Falcon 9 lofting 10+ tonnes into orbit next year and perhaps even sending a Dragon full of crew to the ISS in coming years.

I love this.

A box full of computing history and Radiohead song are two things that I find appealing - combined in this way they caused me enormous pleasure. I want to buy this. Note: If you can’t stand the sound of a ZX Spectrum loading, then skip to 1 minute in!

In case you haven’t heard the original song (or a variety of):

Is that big doggy running Windows?

Boston Dynamics call it “Big Dog” and it looks rather funny, like two guys carrying a sofa, mixed with the Hunter from Half Life 2 Episode 2.

I am in two minds about this puppy - whilst it is an awesome piece of hardware and software engineering which I would love take apart or ride around town, if you pop some weapons on it i’ll be waking in cold sweats about the T3 Sci-Fi Mule coming back from the future to kill me…regardless you should take a look and prepare to be amazed or amused at it’s handling of icy conditions!

PHP 5.2.5 on Windows 2003

There is an oddity in the PHP 5.2.5 installer (and possibly earlier) on Windows 2003 in that it’s default install path is C:\Program Files\PHP. Nothing odd there and indeed the install finishes without issue with the PHP Application Extension and PHP Web Extension configured automatically in IIS (I was tried with both ISAPI and CGI) however when you try to view a PHP page in IIS you get a 404.

It turns out that the path of the PHP Application Extension is in 8.3 format whilst the Web Extension is in LFN format - as far as IIS is concerned that these are two different paths. Editing the PHP Application Extension to include the LFN path enclosed in quotes ( e.g. “C:\Program Files\PHP\php5isapi.dll” ) makes IIS happy.

So if you find you install PHP to a path with non 8.3 paths and you get a 404 on PHP pages then edit the Application Extension to get it going!

Zeitgeist

I’m not sure exactly how much of this 2 hour film is true (a great deal of the details certainly are), but even if just half of it is true then it explains a whole lot about the world and the way it is. Either way it is fascinating (even for someone who doesn’t revel in conspiracy theories), so with Z-Day drawing near (15th March 2008) it seems appropriate to give it a link and hope one of you two visitors (I know who you are…) watch it…

Christmas Wishes

Merry christmas to you all, see you in church.

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Apparently if you type this arbitrary number backwards three times into Windows Vista calculator, the devil appears and asks you to reactivate Windows.

Wiimotely usable?

Finally got around to updating the Wii with the release version of the Internet channel and decided to see just how awkward it would be to write a blog entry with the Wiimote…answer is reasonably awkward, but actually a little better than expected.

I imagined that typing with the on-screen keyboard would be a real chore, but the feedback (audible and visual from the screen and haptic from the Wiimote) makes poking away at the on-screen keyboard easier than most on-screen keyboard interfaces. So it’s pretty impressive but i’ll stick to the laptop for any updates in the future!

Otherwise whilst it’s understandably constrained, the ability to scale the display and to remove the navigation bar makes for a reasonably usable browser even on a regular PAL TV. In terms of technologies, it seems to support the same standards as desktop Opera, with Flash 7/AJAX/RSS all working well.

Being the kind of person who carries his laptop around the house at all times, it’s not as if i’ll be using the browser often, but there will be those odd cases where i’m infront of the TV and not flinging my arms about in Wii gaming world. If only for these moments, it’s nice to know I can watch YouTube, check my Google Mail and Calendar and browse porn RSS feeds with nothing more than a wave of the Wiimote…if only because I am a stupid lazy geek.

Mantis, PHP and PCRE

Had an odd issue to look at where Mantis 1.0.6 was sending blank notification emails once they got to a certain size. After looking at the issue long and hard I determined that it was only happening on PHP 5.2.0 and above and seemed to be related to the size of the notification email, but wasn’t a constant size and seemed to depend on the contents of the bugnotes.

Long story short, the PHP function preg_match_all was failing once the email reached a certain size. preg_match_all is basically a thin wrapper around the Perl Compatible Regular Expression function built into PHP and since 5.2.0 the recursion and backtracking limits have been set and you need to edit your PHP.INI in order to increase them…

[Pcre]
pcre.recursion_limit = 100000
pcre.backtrack_limit = 100000

These are the default values that need to be increased, I found 500000 in each happily worked but I think you need to be careful when changing this as you can allow a complex recursive expression to consume all the stack space and crash PHP. Hope that helps somebody.

More battery woes…

I’ve been running CoconutBattery since I got my MacBook Pro and was interested in watching the battery degrade over time. Last week I was a little suprised to see the battery degrade very sharply to the point where it lasted for 20 minutes tops and often the Mac would simply die as opposed to normally going into Sleep mode.

Given i’ve already had one battery go kaput and knew about the battery recall, I checked but the battery didn’t have a recalled serial number. I contacted AppleCare on the Monday and had a very breif call as they didn’t ask to reset the PRAM or anything else, it was simply a case of Q. “Have you calibrated the battery recently?” A. “Yes I do it every month” and that was it a new battery was on it’s way indeed it arrived the next day - so does Apple have another battery problem which is silently being dealt with through AppleCare or am I particularly unlucky in battery life?