the clueless american

We just got the news that President Ronald Reagan passed away at the age of 93. I don't know anything about him that you won't find in a thousand other places, but I can say something about me: I always listed him as the #1 living person I'd like to meet on those endless questionnaires that you see. I will never have the chance to meet him in person, so I'll just say here what I would have if I'd been able. "Thank you, Mr. President, for everything you did for us. For our country, for our world. I grew up afraid that the world was about to end in a nuclear war, and your team changed that." Goodbye, we're sorry to see you go so soon.

Not much time for writing lately, but I don't want this blog to die so here's a quick update:

e's still not feeling sick, but she can't do anything without feeling completely exhausted. She sleeps 8 hours every night and then 1-3 hours more during her daily naps. This baby is wearing her out!

I spent most of my time working on websites this weekend, unfortunately none on my own. We've been working on our church's website and found ourselves up against a 10MB limit, very small for their photo-heavy site. I noticed that we have several hundred MBs of unused space on our hosting plan and two empty slots for domain names, so we offered and the pastor agreed to let us host his site. The transfer went pretty painlessly, but it was a lot of tedious work. Passed some increasingly annoying emails back and forth with Webintellects Tech support about FXP to transfer the old site to the new. I don't think their A-team works weekends because the last word from them was that they don't support FXP but are planning a software release in the near future. When I pointed out that they merely needed to add a line to their proftpd config file and that FXP support had zero to do with software they release, they closed the trouble ticket instead of responding.

I got the last laugh when I remembered that this otherwise great hosting company lets me login to the shell with ssh. I logged in and then used ncftp (which has recursive file xfer) to connect to the old website. I had everything transferred over in a matter of minutes without having to download the 10MB to my home PC first.

Now that the church website is with us, we have a lot more content options since we have php, mysql, etc. I'm looking to change his site over to an easy to manage CMS. I really liked Church Website in a Box, which is a highly customized PostNuke board, but it's not easily convertible to Spanish so I had to drop it. I may go with a straight PostNuke install which can be done in Spanish; depends on how much time I have.

How's that for a "quick" update? More later!

Grrr...I just spent the better part of an hour debugging what were supposed to be brain-dead simple cgi scripts. The first one failed because I had set the permissions to 777 instead of 755. Apparently Apache can reject scripts that have too much permission without giving a useful error. To me that's like saying you won't accept a general power of attorney because it can be used for evil, but I digress...one chmod 755 later everything was working fine, until...

I moved onto the second, admittedly more complex, script and started getting similar errors. I immediately triple-checked the 755 permissions, but that wasn't it. Turns out there were two errors: the script writer had a space between #! and /usr/lib/perl and my host gave me bad info on the location of sendmail. I spent a good half hour with the script perfectly configured except for the fact that they either moved sendmail or gave me a bad link in the welcome email.

Anyway, it's all better now, and our Church's website now has a simple counter on the home page and a form mail that produces some readble output.