PHP 5 release postponed
Unofficially, but not at all unexpected: the release of the new PHP engine, earlier mentioned to be halfway January, has been postponed to an uknown data, “because there some problems with testing”
DUH.
There have been some issues indeed, but, as far I found, it mostly boils down to decisions taken: Why not support MySQL5 where a good version IS available on both AXP and Itanium? Why has the AJAX engine been limited? The only real error I found so far is the occurring stack overflow, and that is definitely something to worry about, it could be a design flaw in the PCRE module, or is it a simple code error?
As long as the issues that I ran into are properly addressed (that is: solved) I prefer a better product that is properly tested and works well – at least, better than the current version, and I’m willing to wait a while. But keeping your (unofficial) testers – your future users – ‘in the dark’ is a bad, bad habit. HP can (and should) do better.
Licences
is such another issue. This weekend, my current licenses expire. And I haven’t heard of any new arriving. Not a real big issue, I could go on using the Hobbyist license, until September.
15-Feb-2009
Abuse signalled
Mid last week, I took a look to the web logs and I noticed an external source had abused the wiki sto store some data. This person, using an anonymiser to obsure his (her?) IP address, has created an account “Airtickets”, entered an E-mail address (required to get a password) and uploaded a number of files. Retrieved them as well, it seems.
The files didn’t do any harm – these were plain HTML as far as I could determine. Nor would it be able to run uploaded files directlry by the webserver – it’s not set up that way.
Of course, this is not the intention of the VMS wiki, so I tracked down as many information I could get, deleted the files and disabled the account.
Another thing I changed is that I’ll be noticed when a new account is being created.
I kept track of it a few days, and I saw attempts to retrieve the information the day after I removed the files. But all resulted in “404” status. Which is, of course, correct.
Now I deleted the account data, so accessing the account will now fail basically, after I deleted the cached files, as the documentation specifies.
And I notified the address on the issue.
Blog program
The basic idea of this program has developed and put to disk, so it’s more or less time start developing the program itself. There are a few things I have to look into. I intend to use this as an excercise to get into C (heavy, I know) and some VMS-specifics like accessing indexed files (the RMS way) which requires specific code. But there are sufficient examples available for any code block I would like to use. I guess I’ll start coding soon.
WordPress update
The latest version is now 2.7.1, perhaps I’ll update soon. Hoepfully it does work with the current HP-supplied PHP engine (I didn’y notice the definite version yet)
09-Feb-2009
Internet Explorer
seems to loose ground. Market share, anyway.
Given the trouble I encounter with the new version, I’m not at all surprised:
- Opening a secured site, the site data is not passed to tabs opened from that site. For instance, opening webmail signals a validity problem with the certificate. Accepted. But when opening an e-mail in a separate window, the same message shows up and I have to login a second time. I I open an attachment in yet another tab, it’s all the same. But oh wonder: Closing the tabs, a new creation does NOT signal an error, nor request login. A fourth window however, will.
- Why can’t I simply say “accept this exception to the rules” ????
- Login to the blog, something is severly wrong again. The data is not kept alive; all cookies seem ‘gone’ and the admin pages won’t show up; IE ” cannot display the website”.
For the rest, it runs fine, it has some nice features tha actually DO work :). But Microsoft should get the basics right in the first place. And that’s simply where Firefox is superior:
- Openeing a new tabl from a secure site takes it’s credentials ALL of them
- It’s easy to accept a certificate where something is ‘wrong’ (in my case, the CA is “untrusted”, but I know it to right)
- Data once got is used properly. I hardly have any problems during login (or it’s just the PHP engine on OpenVMS)
So the blogs will be administred suing Firefox (under Ubuntu), IE just for convenience – some sites rely on it)
BTW: getting off Microsoft when possible is not that easy. I’ll have to wait for a new laptop (with a bigger disk) before I can run either Linux (Ubuntu, most likely) and Windows (will be Vista, by Company Policy). But until that time, Ubuntu in a Windows-based VM is no problem.
New Blog in Town
Robert Gezelter – the OpenVMS consultant on OpenVMS.Org, has started an additional blog on hist own (VMS/WASD driven?) site. According the accouncement, it’ll cover all IT, not just OpenVMS. Knowing Robert, the content will be worthwhile. Therefore I added a link in the OpenVMS links.
07-Feb-2009
Software offline….
I just learned by this article that the vast OpenVMS archives have been taken offline.
Who’s looking for the freeware CD contents can reach them from this site. As for the rest: I have no idea of the size of the whole archive, but I found I’ve just found out I have a pair of 36 GB disks available. If the archives fit on these, I’ll be happy to (co-)host them.
OpenVMS Technical Journal Volume 12
is just out. It can be read online, and downloaded as a single volume or by article, from the OTJ site
02-Feb-2009
Blog access once more
Working over the Internet, from the hotel, I tried again. On Demeter – the company laptop – I also installed IE 8.0 and again, this has some problems. In general, and with the blogs in particular. It seems it doesn’t cache login data the first time, but a second time the problem seems gone.
I encounter the problem with mail as well. Access to the web-based program that interfaces with VMS mail, requires login, obviously. That’s Ok for getting the headers, but access the first message, another login is required. Furher access is Ok from there on.
Now accessing the blogs, requiring login by a PHP script, is fine but accessing the admin page fails time after timeL teh server cannot display the page. It may be a case setting (have to check on that!). Since the “submit” button adds a diversion to this index page in the URL, it might cause a problem. Accessing the page directly doesn’t work either.
On Demeter, I also have a Ubuntu installation on VMWare, and firefox in that is properly working. The redirection is problematic as well, but direct acess is no problem (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to add this entry 🙂 ).
Another weird problem: to change the date of an entry, you can hit a link to change it. But the PHP engine seems to ignore bookmarks. The page is fully loaded again as it shows. No possibility to change the date…
Words were that PHP 5 would be released some time in January 2009. Still waiting…(I didn’t receive feedback on my remarks either). I think I’ll push the native program into the development cycle….