pelago

The last two hours have seen the Jesusita fire take a turn for the worst due to hi temps, hi winds, and low humidity. Our offices are two blocks from the evactuation warning zone and most of downtown Santa Barbara is now in the evacuation warning area. Here is an updated Google map with the evacuation zone.

Here is the view from our office.

http://airbnb.com/ – “Rent nightly from real people in 809 cities in 71 countries.”

http://www.popcuts.com/ – “Every time a song you bought sells, you get a cut of the proceeds.”

http://bountii.com/ – “Find a lower price on any of the products below and we’ll pay you the Bountii.”

People are discussing whether it’s a complete copy of maxmind’s free database, but some are saying it’s not, either way nothing beats free.

IP address geolocation SQL database

I’ve been following some rants on hacker news and reddit dealing with CSS vs Tables, read in this order when you get a chance:

Why CSS should not be used for layout

http://www.flownet.com/ron/css-rant.html

Why CSS Should Be Used for Layout

http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/page/why-css-should-be-used-for-layout

Don’t Blame CSS For Your Incompetence

http://www.jemjabella.co.uk/blog/dont-blame-css-for-your-incompetence

The last article sums it all up in my opinion.

The Pelago offices are safe from the fire, although we are only a block away from the evacuation warning boundaries. We are ready to unplug the servers and load up the cars if we have to. Our Intervals data centers are in Houston, so there are no worries about interrupted service for our customers. Here are some links to fire updates (note: some of the links may be spotty due to the fires):

• Google maps mashup showing evacuation zones
• Westmont College web site
• Westmont blog with pictures and updates
• Photos of the fire from the Westmont Campus
• SB County Evacuation Updates
• PDF Map of Evacuation Areas
• Updates from Daily Kos
• Streaming Video from KCAL
• Local Coverage from the Independent
• Photos from the LA Times
• Fire Photos at Flickr
• Edhat Updates
• Crisiswire

Here’s a great time-saver extension. Toolbar Buttons is perfect for adding tough-to-find Firefox functions. They’re there BUT you have dig deep within Tools > Options to get to them. Need to quickly disable javascript, flash and images with just three quick clicks? No problem, just drag and drop the buttons. Here is my current setup:

A lot of people are familiar with PHP’s functions, and though Javascript functions are often quite similar, some functions may be missing or addressed differently. The Javascript implementations should be as compliant with the PHP versions as possible, a good indication is that the PHP function manual could also apply to the Javascript version.

http://kevin.vanzonneveld.net/techblog/

UPDATE: Using this article at http://www.hagrin.com/315/installing-mcrypt-a-godaddy-linux-virtual-dedicated-server-vds I was able to install mcrypt on a Godaddy Virtual Dedicated Server in just a few steps:

1. SSH into your VDS with your favorite SSH client or the SSH Java applet offered by GoDaddy.
2. Login with your credentials.
3. Su to the root user.
4. Type “yum install libmcrypt”. Say yes to the prompts.
5. Type “yum install php-mcrypt”. Say yes to the prompts.
6. Restart the server using “/usr/sbin/apachectl restart”.

We recently deployed a web site using GoDaddy’s virtual dedicated server. Everything about the default PHP installation was fine, except that libmcrypt was not available. When I asked the godaddy support staff “How do we enable libmcrypt for PHP?” their response was far from helpful:

Thank you for contacting Server Support. Unfortunately 3rd party installations and configurations are not supported.

Rather than argue with the support team about what constitutes a 3rd party installation, I decided to google around and see if I could do it myself. Hours later, I succeeded. Here are the steps for installing libmcrypt:

1. su root
2. yum install gcc-c++
3. yum install lex
4. yum install libxml2
5. yum install libxml2-devel
6. yum install flex
7. wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mcrypt/libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz?modtime=1171868460&big_mirror=0
8. tar -xzvf libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.gz
9. cd libmcrypt-2.5.8
10. ./configure
11. make
12. make install
13. wget http://museum.php.net/php5/php-5.1.6.tar.gz
14. tar -xzvf php-5.1.6.tar.gz
15. cd php-5.1.6
16. ./configure –with-mcrypt=shared,/usr/local/lib
17. make (after running ‘make’, DO NOT RUN ‘make install’)
18. cp modules/mcrypt.so /usr/lib/php/modules/
19. Add a file /etc/php.d/mcrypt.ini
    ; Enable mcrypt extension module
    extension=mcrypt.so
20. /usr/sbin/apachectl restart

That’s it! To confirm a successful install, just run phpinfo() and look for the mcrypt section

There’s a bug with 2.5 that doesn’t allow you to moderate comments. The problem is with the _wp_get_comment_list function and how it retrieves counts from the database specifically a missing column index. Running this line on your database should fix the problem:

ALTER TABLE wp_comments ADD INDEX ( comment_date_gmt );

Want to watch higher quality YouTube videos?

Add &fmt=18 to the last part of the URL. You won’t see DVD quality video but you’ll see a great difference from whats currently available.

Edit: Want to make it even easier? This GM script does it for you.