It started yesterday, a strange production bug which made a page unavailable to the end-user. The project I work on has a very nifty bug catching feature that just outputs a blank page whenever a 500 error happen (which makes it soooo easy to debug). So I roll-up my sleeves and ssh on the production server and start browsing this haystack of logs we keep. There I find the source of this ugly 500: PHP Fatal error: require_once(): failed opening required '/opt/www/model/app.mailgnp.php' in /opt/www/view/mailform.php line 10 (yes we have an ugly app). Ok, so there must be a typo of some sort. Opening mailform.php, what do I find on line 10? require_once '/opt/www/model/app.mailgrp.php';
Yes indeed, '/opt/www/model/app.mailgrp.php' exists and '/opt/www/model/app.mailgnp.php' doesn't. So why in the world PHP is trying to load a file that doesn't exist instead of the one that's written in the statement??
Replacing require_once with include fixed the bug, and now I'm left with a fixed bug but no clue about why it happened and a strange feeling of a coming doom (I cannot safely rely anymore on what looked like a perfectly Cartesian process).
Seriously?? If anyone can give an explanation about why two native javascript Date-Object methods give a different result with one of them being Date + 6 months instead of Date + 18 months, I'd be glad to read it.
I'm still alive and well! Right now I'm in the middle of the process of moving out of my appartement to move in with Carole in her appartement. Her flatmate moved out so I'm taking the free spot :)
I've been intensifying the rehearsing with The Acolyts so that we can project a little show in the near future, since Romain took the druming spot in the band he had to learn the songs and we've set course on more difficult musical material. So it's been challenging to play some songs, so far we can play Harbinger, The Nameless, Castle Bravo, Funerals on the moon, One eyed crone* and Insanity Darkness Metal* (* still learing but almost there).
Also the server I was using to store the music streamed on the blog isn't and won't be available anymore so I took a great step forward and started renting my own domain theacolyts.com and a hosted server. There might be some blog moving too but if I do so I'd like to revisit the design and all of that... So you get a better experience out of your Paris Clem reading/listening.
I've been working on some more songs, so there is some stuff coming for you later!
As you can see, today I did a minor style update that should make the blog look shinier on Firefox 3.6+, Chrome 4+ and Safari 4+, using some CSS3 magik :) Introducing linear gradients and some more border-radius. I like it. I could make it work in IE using some shady Microsoft filters, but they are quite buggy so I'm not gonna spend some time on it!
I juste discovered a couple of features of Blogger, so welcome to the new buggy Comment thing on the right and the new vote thing under each post. Google should put a bit of time in improving the wysiwyg editor instead of adding dome wierd buggy addons.
Looks like a twitt but it ain't, it's just an uninspired blog post. (twitts could be just that?)
I'm testing the HTML5 audio tag. As far as Firfox is concerned it only works with wav and vorbis (OGG) files. I'm curious to know if that works behind your firewalls and other procrastination exterminators.
edit: Many thanks for your testing! I did some tests on my side and here are the results:
Firefox 3.5 => Success (even behind Natixis' firewall of death) Chrome 3.0 => Fail (Thanks Leif!) Edit :Chrome 4.0 => Success ! Safari 4 => Half Fail (Support the audio tag since 3.1 but doesn't support OGG) Opera 6.24 => Fail Opera 10 (beta) => Fail although this browser is impressively fast! IE => Of course failed
Conclusion:
As expected the HTML5 audio tag's support is still very thin. Even if the tag was supported by all the browsers there is a codec war preparing. Apple is pushing for AAC and H.264 while Mozilla implements OGG vorbis. Of course Microsoft (if they ever plan to implement HTML5, why bother?) will want their DRM filled WMA/WMV to be the only standard on the web. Guess what, you, web develepper, will never use such things as HTML5 audio tags because your boss will tell you: "you're ****ing with 70% of our market share". So back to flash my firends! It's a weird buggy, fat and slow pluggin that somehow managed to find its way on most client's browser. Other solution: if you only target A browser, well then just use all of its power! (you could even go ahead and use some ActiveX if you are crazy enough and if you hate anything free (and sane) in this world)
Hey there! Firefox 3.5 is almost out, you can find the Relase Candidate 2 version on mozilla's website. I'm already using FF3.5 at work and at home, it already has Firebug (v1.4b) which is pretty much all I need in my toolbox to do my CSS, HTML and Javascript debugging. The new version offers many improvements on speed and memory consumption, so, to my friends out there who are usualy reluctent to move to new versions (Ruben?), it pretty much is FF3 but faster and lighter so it's ok you can go on, do the upgrade and your PC won't burn. FF3.5 also offers new exciting CCS3 and HTML5 implementations and I'm willing to use them. As I can't use them where I work because wat.tv's browser market share is 60% Internet Explorer, I'm thinking about trying these new techniques on my blog. So over time this blog will have some new cool features that will only work in FF3.5 and the future versions of Safari, Google Chrome, Opera... all the other browsers that are aware of standards and willing to keep up with the innovation. Unfortunately the business website market is a decade late technology wise because of the need to degrate gracefully in IE.
Anyhow, do yourself a favor and upgrade your surfin' with Firefox (3.5)!
Or not, but that's what some of your office firewall will think. The dot CLEM files are just MP3 file renamed. I have renamed all the files on the blog so some of you guys who can access the blog but can't download the files from your office should be able to do so from now... lucky you!
