Archive for March, 2008

Hockey Themed Bingo Cards for the Playoffs

Friday, March 28th, 2008

It’s the time of year for NHL hockey fans to think about the playoffs.  At least, fans who’s team will qualify for the Stanley Cup playoffs… any other Vancouverites out there?

So, for fellow hockey fans who want hockey themed bingo cards, we’ve just created a template word list for you!

As usual, at print-bingo.com you can customize your hockey themed bingo cards.

Fixing list indent in CSS

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

A very quick post for today.

I was tweaking the layout of Naque, our unique names generator.  It took a bit of fiddling to eliminate the indentation of the list elements in an unordered list.

E.g. <ul><li>first item</li></ul>

For some reason I couldn’t remove the ident.  Margin (left) was the obvious thing to change.  However, you also have to change the padding!

CSS, so nice, yet so confusing sometimes…

The Naque for Unique Names is Reborn

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

We’ve finally gotten around to reworking our fun site for choosing or creating unique names. Naque, which is now at unique-names.com,  surprised us by developing a reasonably large audience over the years.  So the old site deserved a bit of a face lift.

We made changes to the layout and colour scheme.  Behind the scenes, we made bigger changes so that the site is a lot easier to change in the future.  All the tools are still there, including our favorite, the ever popular Word Mixer.

So, the greatest site for creating unique words and names is ready to take on 2008 and beyond.

Visit the Naque for Unique Names to see for yourself.

How I had to fix PHP PEAR

Monday, March 10th, 2008

I’ve always found the code libraries of PHP PEAR to be quite useful.

But the PEAR website and individual package documentation is often baffling. I wish users could contribute comments and sample code easily, like the online documentation of PHP.

On to today’s rant. I just upgraded the Linux distribution that runs my home server to SME7, see contribs.org. Since it’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it comes with an old version of PHP Pear. Out of the box, it does not work. This is OK. On the frontpage of pear.php.net homepage the reason is clearly posted:

“[January 3, 2008] As promised, XML-RPC has been disabled at pear.php.net.”

The news post tells you how to update older installs of PEAR to work with the new system. That would be fantastic, if the instructions worked.

But they don’t. At least for older than expected versions of PEAR.

Fortunately, I have notes from earlier this year on another server upgrade I did.  I had to search high and low to get my old version of Pear working. Earlier this year, I run these commands to upgrade and fix PEAR:

pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/Archive_Tar http://pear.php.net/get/XML_Parser http://pear.php.net/get/Console_Getopt-1.2

(note, that’s all one command up there)

pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.4.3.tar


pear upgrade PEAR

The difference is the Console_Getopt-1.2 line. It specifies the exact version of the Console_Getopt package to install. Shrug.

Today, I had an extra step:

On the second command, the PEAR-1.4.3.tar one, I go this error:
requires package `PEAR’ >= 1.3.3

I guessed that I needed to do a half-step upgrade first… i.e.
pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.3.3.tar

Then do the original line:
pear upgrade –force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.4.3.tar

Then the final upgrade:
pear upgrade PEAR

I don’t know why PEAR had to disable the XML-RPC interface.  I don’t really care.  But I do find it annoying when the instructions on the front page of a site don’t work.

This problem will affect other people besides me. This will probably hit everyone else who is installing a new RHEL4 (or derivative) server. Long life distributions with non-functional PHP PEAR software will be kicking around for a few more years.

I’d post this on the PEAR Wiki. But there is none. Fortunately, this blog gets indexed by the search engines, so maybe it will prove useful to someone other than me.

Naque for Unique Names (finally) Gets a Domain

Monday, March 10th, 2008

After at least a couple years of neglect, we’ve decided to touch up our fun little website for creating unique names.

The first step was to finally move the site to it’s own domain name, no more piggy-backing off of our corporate domain, perceptus.ca!

The Naque for Unique Names has moved from it’s old address at http://unique-name.perceptus.ca to http://unique-names.com.

It’s a small step, but it’s the first of many. Anyone with links to the old site are encouraged to update them.