http://osterman.com/wordpress day to day Sat, 09 May 2009 21:28:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Recently, I learned how broken the dispute resolution process is with Bank of America. I asked them to send me the receipts for 5 recent charges from the same Mexican Food place across the street from me. I love Mexican food, but there's no way I could have eaten 5 ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2009/05/09/disputing-credit-card-charges   {{{ <link rel="canonical"  href="<?php echo url_for($sf_context->getRouting()->getCurrentInternalUri(true), true); ?>" /> }}}   More information about the new canonical link tags can be found http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/ http://osterman.com/wordpress/2009/02/18/automatic-canonical-link-tags-in-symfony Recently, I moved one of my SVN repositories onto a new server. Everything seemed fine until I tried to commit. SVN complained: {{{ svn commit . --message '....' svn: Commit failed (details follow): svn: Can't close activity db: Error string not specified yet }}} And the server logs show: {{{ [Wed Dec 03 22:53:20 2008] [error] [client 207.7.129.212] Could ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/12/03/svn-commit-error-cant-close-activity-db Sorry to say it, but X.org eye candy is about to eclipse Mac OSX. Check out this video to see what I mean: [yt:_ImW0-MgR8I] To get this for yourself on Debian, these are the steps I had to take. {{{apt-get install libcairo2 librsvg2-2 libglitz1 libglitz-glx1 compiz compiz-fusion-plugins-extra compiz-fusion-plugins-main compiz-gnome compiz-plugins}}} Modify your X.org ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/11/18/compiz-cairo-dock-on-debian I was recently contacted by someone who got stuck setting up Starling and realized that the documentation is relatively sparse on setting up Starling. The process is easy once you know how Starling works on the inside, but not looking in. To get started, I will assume you have ruby and ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/11/10/howto-install-starling VMWare can be a real bore to upgrade when there are major kernel updates. Very often, the supplied modules with VMWare will not compile. For example, I got this today: {{{ CC [M]  /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:197: error: unknown field 'nopage' specified in initializer /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:198: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1 }}} The solution is ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/09/25/vmware-upgrades The memcache protocol requires that all lines in the server response end with CRLN (\r\n). The Starling server doesn't strictly obey this for the STATS command. The fix is trivial and the author has been notified of the fix. Edit {{{lib/starling/handler.rb}}} and add the following gsub right before .freeze in the ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/07/18/starling-protocol-bug-in-stats-response Recently, I was getting the error {{{Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Function spl_autoload_call() hasn't defined the class it was called for in...}}} In my particular case, the problem stemmed from defining a deserialization function using {{{ini_set('unserialize_callback_func', 'spl_autoload_call')}}} (well, symfony defines it) In the process of deserializing an object, it tried to instantiate a class which ... http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/07/05/what-to-do-if-spl_autoload_call-hasnt-defined-the-class If you want to install CPAN modules as Debian packages, this HOWTO is for you. First, install dh-make-perl: {{{apt-get install dh-make-perl}}} Then build & install the package. For example, if you wish to install the module Nagios::Plugins::Memcached from CPAN, simply run: {{{dh-make-perl --install --cpan Nagios::Plugins::Memcached}}} You're done. http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/06/19/installing-cpan-packages-for-debian The following Nginx configuration technique will allow you to do rewrites to status codes. {{{ rewrite ^.*?\.(?:swf|xml|gif|jpg|png|css|js)$ @404 break; location = @404 { return 404; } }}} http://osterman.com/wordpress/2008/05/14/nginx-rewrite-to-404