I’ve been trying to persuade Karen that Japanese food isn’t really that strange, but seeing this shop has convinced her otherwise :)
Spork and chopsticks
At YAPC::Asia Ingy told us all about Sporx, explaining that it was a combination of Spork and Takahashi, and so should be pronounced “Sporkahashi”. When I began to tell Karen about “Sporkahashi” she said “That was clever” when I had only mentioned the name. Because she knew little about Spork and nothing about Takahashi she had assumed the “hashi” was 箸 instead of 橋.
Well, Karen wouldn’t have thought about the kanji characters, but she knew that “hashi” (箸) meant “chopsticks”, so she thought a “spork and chopsticks” name was a smart idea from Ingy.
I don’t think anyone else spotted that. The “hashi” (橋) in Takahashi (高橋) means “bridge”; 高橋 is a surname that means “high bridge”.
YAPC::Asia in Tokyo
I gave two talks today in YAPC::Asia in Tokyo. Surprisingly I finished both talks in a lot less time than planned; usually I need to rush at the end to stay on schedule. I really should work out why these talks finished quickly when I spoke more slowly.
One of the talks was 混合語 (“Kongougo”) (yes, the title will look strange if you don’t have a Japanese font installed). When I gave this talk in Europe I spend some time explaining Japanese to the Europeans, and I obviously didn’t need to do that in Japan. So instead I rewrote the slides to use more Japanese. It seemed to work: the audience laughed a lot, which is really the only important thing.
Free Software / Open Source event in Belfast in 10 hours
Our Free Software event, FOSS Means Business (or BelFOSS as I still call it) is due to start in about 10 hours. Everything seems to be going well, but I am probably missing something.
Two years is not such a long time
I used to have a blog, but I stopped writing two years ago. I’m going to try to start again, and my first step is switching from MovableType to WordPress by mostly following Tony’s example. I also convinced Karen to switch too, by moving her blog so she didn’t have much choice.
I needed to perform the same Kwiki format cleanup that Tony did, but I wanted a different permalink structure: I prefer the date and name based option in WordPress. So I didn’t need to hack the WordPress import script or worry about matching IDs. Instead I needed to generate a list of redirects, one for every blog entry. I wrote a short Perl script to create the list from the Movable Type export:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $user = shift or die "usage: $0 user\n";
local $/ = "--------\n";
while(<>) {
my ($id) = /^ID: (\d+)/m;
$id = sprintf "%06d", $id;
my ($title) = /^TITLE: (.*)$/m;
$title = lc $title;
$title =~ s/\s+/-/g;
$title =~ s/[^\w-]//g;
my ($m,$d,$y) = m{^DATE: (\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)}m;
print "Redirect permanent /$user/archives/$id.html
http://martian.org/$user/$y/$m/$d/$title\n";
}
etcon #0
Despite the name, it isn’t a conference for extra terrestrials. ETCon, or ETech, is O’Reilly’s emerging technology conference. It started today with tutorials that we didn’t enroll for, so we just came down to use the network. We did try to register this morning, but we were told that we had to wait until this afternoon because we are all evil terrorists who might sneak into one of the tutorials we didn’t enroll for and infect everyone with a new lethal virus we have developed, or something like that.
Apache2 cgi userdir
A simple reqest: I wanted to run a cgi script from my public_html dir in my home dir. So I set the appropriate permissions and the ExecCGI option in my Apache2 config and tried the script. It failed. The error log reported “Premature end of script headers”, so there was obviously something wrong with the script.
But no! The script worked when I tested it. It just wouldn’t work when Apache2 tried it.
I had no idea what was happening, so I tried some other scripts. A pattern soon emerged: any script in my home dir would fail. After spending so long getting this far, I’m glad that my first guess at the real problem was correct.
It appears that Apache2 won’t execute scripts in userdirs if it suspects that someone other than the user may be able to affect them, so it didn’t like my scripts because my directories had group write permission. A quick
chmod g-w ~/public_html
was enough to make it all work.