G. A. Henty, 1905, read as a Project Gutenberg e-text from manybooks.net

This is actually a collection of action/adventure stories; only the first of which has anything to do with Malay pirates. I’d dismiss the collection as forgettable adventure fluff, except for the fact that several of the stories have flights of pedagogical exposition on the part of one character or another which give a fascinating insight into some British end-of-the-empire ideas and beliefs.

W.B. Yeats, 1902, read as a Gutenberg Project e-book from manybooks.net

A collection of folk stories, reminiscences, poems, and observations of the Irish countryside as retold by William Yeats, read in preparation for our upcoming Ireland trip.

OK. Entrepreneurs, read up. I’m gonna give you some ideas that’ll make you rich.

Start my ranting:

1. Can I really be the only person who wants to share Thunderbird/Seamonkey address books with a spouse? I mean, how hard can it be?

What I’d like:

• Each of our “Personal Address Book” collections show up as a list on one another’s address books as a list (e.g., mine shows up on my wife’s machine as “Samuel’s Address Book”. It could use the machine name instead, if it’s easier).
• We can see one another’s mailing lists in our address books
• Manual sync is fine — automatic would be even better
• Simplistic merging is OK, so long as there’s a way to resolve conflicts
• Ability to mark lists as private or shared

2. Can I really be the only person who wants to share a checkbook program with a spouse? I mean, how hard can it be?

What I’d like:

• Ability to enter checks / charges / deposits into a common account register
• Ability for either person to perform reconciliation
• Ability to have accounts that are not shared

3. Can I really be the only person who wants to have an intelligent, revision-capable backup script that doesn’t require shell on the destination end? I mean, how hard can it be?

What I’d like:

• rdiff-backup, only permitting an ftp-based push of the backup file.

More to come, as I experience more outrage.

Jean Shepherd, Doubleday 1966

I arrived at this book via the now-obligatory film Christmas Story. The film is not only adapted from the book, but is narrated by Shepherd.

The movie, it must be stated, is cobbled together from numerous unrelated episodes from the book, and yet forms a much more cohesive narrative arc than the book. The book is a collection of reminiscences, but the thread that ties them together is meandering stream-of-consciousness rather than a telling of a particular story.

The various episodes vary in their impact and quality. Shepherd’s talent for exaggeration and consciously creating mythic trappings for the mundane is the source of some of the humor; self-deprecation, an occasional winking (to let you know that he knows you’re in on the joke), and a real sense of which details are important supply the rest.

Shepherd’s approach is more successful for some stories than others. Some, however, are profound. “Leopold Doppler and the Great Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot” gives insights into human nature, the Great Depression, and manages to create the very distinct feel of a specific time and place.

I’ve been busy setting up a new hosting environment for a bunch of static HTML and PHP-based web sites on a Go Daddy Virtual Server. It was going swimmingly, until I came to an old CMS Made Simple site (running 0.10.x), which merely returned blank pages. Newer versions of CMS Made Simple ran fine. I could find nothing in the virtual host’s web error logs, the php log, the mysql error logs, the eaccelerator error logs, or any other system logs — except in the main Apache error log, there was:

child pid XXXXX exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Searching around, this looks like it could be some kind of threading issue; however, I’m following the recommendations and using the Apache 2 prefork MPM.

Eventually, the (weak) solution I came up with is to turn off eaccelerator for that virtual host. This remedies the situation, although I can’t say it makes me very happy, since I don’t understand exactly what’s going on (or what the problem is).

I’d welcome insight into this.

Details: Fedora Core 4, Apache/2.0.54 (Fedora), PHP 5.0.4, eAccelerator 0.9.5.