For a while already I’ve been following VT’s Tech Blog. Vinu Thomas writes in an excellent way about technology there, talking about all kinds of topics, ranging from PHP, security to setting up a linux wireless access point.
Welcome Vinu to the network!
Hmm… It looks like I am in some kind of identity crisis. Either that, or someone else is in mine 😉
Take this guy. He is claiming that I am one of the original phpBB developers, and that I’ve moved on to join the phpBB2 Plus team. I am also the author of some kind of software called the Cracker Tracker.
I have never done any official phpBB development. I am not even part of the phpBB2 Plus team. And I don’t even know what the Cracker Tracker is! Now that is fun. Am I in some kind of identity crisis? 😉
Compared by many to the Da Vinci Code, expectations for this book were quite high for me, as I really enjoyed reading the Da Vinci Code. But if you start out that way, you may be disappointed. It’s not that this book is bad, not at all, it’s just quite different from the Da Vinci Code.
I do understand the link between both books. Both handle with historical happenings, with mystery, with the main characters puzzling their way toward some ultimate solution. However, where the Da Vinci Code is much more about action, about fast-paced happenings, The Rule of Four takes a different direction. The Rule of Four is more of a brainteaser, with all kinds of puzzles and less action but more psychological impact.
The fact that this book is mainly about the obsession of the main characters with an ancient book will definitely be a reason why this book more than the Da Vinci Code was positively welcomed by fanatic book readers. It definitely worked for me 😉
So, to wrap it up: I have mixed feelings about this book. Most feelings are positive, the book is well-written, the story is good, the characters are great. The negative feelings are mainly because of the expectations I had beforehand. So basically, it’s my fault to be influenced by what other people say 🙂
I’ve been following this weblog for quite a while after another member of the network recommended the weblog to me. Yes, I know, it’s yet another mac user 😉 but I feel Andre knows what he’s talking about and I think his weblog will add something to the network.
So please join me in welcoming Osxy[dot]nl to the Ufdi Network.
It has been a while since I last read something by Elaine Cunningham. It must have been before I encountered BookCrossing. After that, I started reading more than just fantasy and sci-fi 😉
Elaine Cunningham is definitely one of my favorite fantasy authors, together with Tolkien and R.A. Salvatore. Her books in the Forgotten Realms series are easy to read, have good stories and great characters.
In The Dream Spheres we encounter some characters we’ve seen before. Danilo Thann has featured in a few books already, and so have some of the other characters. Again, this book has an exciting plot, and I seriously until just a few chapters before the end didn’t know exactly what was going on. Definitely not as predictable as some books!
Yes, it was nice to finally read some fantasy again from the Forgotten Realms series. I should do that more often.
I can not seem to find out if the movie Outbreak was or was not based on this book. There are too many similarities to say it’s coincidence, but there are too many differences to truely be the movie of the book. So maybe they just got inspired.
I had little expectations before starting this book. I had heard some positive things about Cook in general, and this book was sent to me as a gift (a RABCK) and recently, I felt like picking it up to read it. A good choice it was. Where it usually takes me 2-4 weeks to finish a book, this book only took me about a week. It is a very exciting book, full of tension. It is written very well and very easy to read. I definitely can recommend this book to anyone who likes thrillers.
Silence? It seems like that lately here. There’s several reasons for this. First of all, for some reason, I seem to be unable to really get inspiration on topics to write about. There are several topics that I’d love to write about (XUL, World of Warcraft, the Zend Framework, hacking (thanks to the book I’m currently reading), music (I’ve recently started working on some new stuff)). Lots of topics that ask for my attention, and that I’d love to give attention. But when I sit down to write about it (mostly on the train from work) I just can not find the words to actually offer something useful. And thus, I opt to not post anything at all. This may seem boring, and I realize that, but trust me, you’d be bored and annoyed by useless posts otherwise 😉
But there are more reasons. When at home, most of my time goes to Tomas, Marjolein, and World of Warcraft. Also, lately, I seem to be a bit tired (and not just because of late night gaming, because I don’t do that too often). I often sleep on the trainrides to Amsterdam in the morning and also on the way back to Amersfoort in the evening. If I can stay awake enough, I read on the bus from Woudenberg to Amersfoort and from Amersfoort to Woudenberg. I’m not sure why this is. I sure hope it will pass.
There is one single tool that rules the world for photo management. This tool is called Picasa. Up until now, it was only available for Windows, which sucked bigtime and I definitely liked the app. Big Google rules (again!). They created a linux version!
OK, not really. They made an installer that includes a specially configured Wine to run Picasa on Linux. But it functions just like a native Linux app!
So go and download your Picasa for linux 🙂
It’s funny. Earlier this week I encountered this problem, and then just now, someone else writes about it. Though their problem is exactly opposite to the problem I encountered, the cause and the solution is the same.
So what is the problem? In the php.ini, you can configure the session.gc_maxlifetime setting. This setting controls how long a session may live before the garbage collector kills it because it has expired. Then, in your own script, if you feel the php.ini setting is too short or too long, you can specify your own gc_maxlifetime by using ini_set(). So far, no problem.
The problem we encountered was that our php.ini setting was set to something like 24 minutes, and we wanted 24 hours. So we used ini_set() to set the maxlifetime to that value, and still we got reports where a session would time out much earlier than expected. Not good.
Last week, after a bit of digging, we found the cause of the problem. We have multiple applications running on this server that use sessions. Most use the default php.ini setting, and not this adapted setting. All sessions are saved in files in a directory (/tmp in our case). But when the garbage collector is triggered, it does not discriminate between sessions created using the default php.ini setting and the one we set manually. No problem when the garbage collector is triggered from our script. But a big problem when it’s being triggered by the other applications. The garbage collector will go through the /tmp directory and see a lot of session files that have expired. It will delete them. Gone is your session that should’ve lived for 24 hours.
This is, in my very humble opinion, a big shortcoming in PHP’s session handling. There is an easy work-around though: those of your applications that use a custom gc_maxlifetime should also be saving the session files to a different session.save_path. Here also, ini_set() will support you in setting this value. This should of course point to an existing directory which is writable by your php/webserver user.
Now, the next step of course, would be that php would change their session handling. I can not imagine this being too hard. Each session file would, aside from the already present (serialized) session data, contain a tag that is in some way seperated from the actual session data. This tag contains the timestamp of the session’s expiration. When a session is being written, the session handler can easily calculate the moment of expiry for the session based on the current timestamp + active session.gc_maxlifetime. Now, when the garbage collector is triggered, it need only read the first line of each session file and purge the files that have a timestamp lower than the current time. I understand that this is probably slightly more resource-intensive than just reading the timestamp of file, but it would enhance php’s error handling in such way that I personally feel this is not a problem. It could even be an optional php.ini setting (session.enhanced_session_lifetime = 1). Of course, I’m not in the PHP group, so I guess for now I’ll just have to implement a custom session handler with this functionality. Quite a pain though, since I’ll have to do this with all my sites then. Or just implement the above fix of course 😉