Benjamin L. Haas

I recently bought a new Windows 7 laptop. Along with all the other basic programming tools, I immediately installed Apache, PHP, and MySQL. One of the first things I wanted to do was to try to install Drupal. I spent two days fighting the white screen of death on Drupal installation, though, and I finally figured out why -- and I can blame it on Windows.

Background: I manually edited settings.php and entered the MySQL connection string, and I navigated to http://localhost/drupal6/install.php. The page would attempt to load for about thirty seconds, and would then give up. No errors were reported, either on-screen or in the Apache error.log.

This post explains what the problem was:
http://dpotter.net/Technical/2009/12/mysql_connect-to-localhost-on-windo...

By default, the Windows hosts file (\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) has the line commented out that maps localhost to 127.0.0.1. What was strange was that I could navigate to a localhost address and Firefox would have no problem resolving it, but mysql_connect would fail to resolve and connect to localhost. All I had to do was un-comment this line in hosts and I was good to go.

I stopped in the T-Mobile store near my office yesterday to finally get a hands-on look at the new G1, a.k.a., the first Google Phone. It's even worse than I expected. I never evem turned the thing on, because after playing with the handset for a minute, I knew I wasn't interested. It's big, it's plastic, and it feels funny. The closest thing I can compare it to is holding a Mattel LED football game from the 80's. I'll never get a phone with a sliding screen, because I know, between getting stuffed into a pocket, tumbling around in my messenger bag, and falling on the ground, it'll be broken within the year, not to mention coated in grease and dust in all the joints, crevasses, and undersides. But worst of all were the buttons, which are small and give very little tactile response when pressed. They're round and smooth, little chiclets, about the same size as the buttons on a Blackberry Curve, but much less elevated from the handset. There's very little click response when pressed, so I felt like a clumsy oaf with stubby paws when trying to type. Those two issues alone are reason enough for me not to give it another thought.

Well, it looks like I won't be able to aggregate my Facebook feeds in here any more. The fine folks at Facebook decided to alter the structure of their feeds, making them totally useless.

A valid RSS feed is made up of one or more items (corresponding to each of the latest blog posts, picture posts, etc.), and each item needs to have a valid url associated with it. This url is called the GUID element (Globally Unique Identifier). This is so that each feed item can be associated with a unique web page. You click on the GUID link, and you go to the unique page.

And now Facebook went and changed their status feeds so that a valid GUID isn't assigned to each item.

Take a look. Here's my Facebook status feed:
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=668194973&viewer=668194973&k...

(If you're using Firefox you'll see a nicely formatted page. If you're using Google Chrome, you'll probably see an unformatted string of data. If you're using IE or Safari...well, good luck to you.)

Notice that every item in that list links to exactly the same place. Furthermore, if you click on any of those links, you can see that each one leads you to the same place - a generalized version of my Facebook status page. Not good at all.

What's the deal, Facebook? Care to explain your decision?

I launched a new site yesterday, ATP Festival Forums, a centralized place for discussing all things ATP-related:

http://www.atpfestivalforums.com/

It's still new, but I think I got all the major kinks worked out. The design could use some improvement, but I'll leave that to someone who knows what he or she is doing.

Basically, I've always wanted to be part of online discussions about ATP festivals that are either coming up, or just passed, and I got tired of searching around for the disparate message boards, either on the individual band sites, or at Drowned in Sound, or wherever. We'll see if this takes off. If not, it was a fun mini-project, and I got to try out an implementation of phpBB.

Here's my take on the Google Chrome browser, which was officially released in beta yesterday.

Pros:

• Tabs run in separate processor threads, which means the whole browser doesn't die when one tab crashes/freezes, just that individual tab. Sounds good, but I haven't encountered a crash yet so I haven't seen the "sad tab" face (see page 5 of the Chrome Comic).
• Separate threads for separate browser tabs also means potentially less memory bloat when you've had your web browser open all day, and opened and closed hundreds of tabs. In principle, closing a tab means killing off each individual processor thread, so the memory footprint shouldn't become a monster after a day's worth of unclaimed memory leaks.
• The task manager sounds like a fun tool for control freaks like me. Even if I don't need to manually kill individual threads, it's great to watch the stats on the processes. I especially like the almost-hidden "Stats for nerds" view (also available by typing "about:memory" in the omni-bar).
• A new, faster javascript virtual machine, combined with Google Gears, should be quite helpful for making js-heavy Google web apps (Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.) really fly. As a heavy user of these apps, this sounds awesome, and should keep them running fast as they get more feature-rich.
• Since it's built off the Webkit rendering engine, it doesn't introduce any new standards or compliance issues. As a developer, I'm pleased to see that I won't have to test sites against yet another browser. And hopefully, it'll help push Webkit toward becoming the de facto standard, which means less variation amongst browsers, which means less work for me.

Cons (and these are major, far more important to me than the pros listed above):

• There's no extensions support yet. No PDF Download, no ScreenGrab, no IE Tab, no Greasemonkey.
• The native DOM inspector isn't that feature-rich, and a poor substitute for Firebug. Until Chrome supports extensions, it's unusable as a web development tool.
• There's no setting that forces Chrome to jump to newly opened tabs.
• No bookmark editor. As far as I can tell I can't easily move around large groups of bookmarks at a time. This became especially annoying when Chrome imported my Firefox bookmarks into a "Imported Firefox Bookmarks" folder.
• In an attempt to maximize window real estate, there's no status bar at the bottom. Unfortunately for me, I prefer having a dedicated status bar. Text sometimes pops up down there in the bottom of the Chrome window, such as revealing the destination of a link, or giving highlights of "page loading" status, but it's an annoying flicker on the page.

Verdict so far: it's fun to play around with, and it has nice animations, but it's not robust or complete enough to switch over fully yet.