Yesterday/last night, I got PHP Gallery up and run­ning on one of my Dreamhost sites.  Mind you, this is not an easy task.  The com­bi­na­tion of secu­rity restric­tions and a funky home direc­tory path makes it not so fun.  Their PHP setup does not allow exec() calls–meaning none of the netpbm image com­mands will exe­cute.  I had to set aside a direc­tory that exe­cutes PHP code as a CGI script instead of a server exten­sion, then install the CGI ver­sion of the PHP run­time with the cor­rect secu­rity set­tings, then install the miss­ing (GIF patent related) netpbm files, etc.  The prac­ti­cal upshot of all this is the online gallery.  These are mostly pic­tures sal­vaged from the old diedrichs.org server, with a few of Pr0tland and kit­ties.  Be sure to check out the fohh­h­h­taaaay of St Ides High Grav­ity Malt Liquor.  That has been sit­ting in the fridge for a month.  I'm scared to open it.

My cur­rent view on the whole Sad­dam thing: “who cares?”  Sure, he is a Big Bad Dic­ta­tor Man–but he has been on the run for quite a while and has been a laugh­ably use­less polit­i­cal fig­ure for longer.  Now, I real­ize that it is impor­tant he is caught and brought to jus­tice.  He really is more than sim­ple comic relief, after all.  Maybe I should cor­rect the “who cares?” to “why the hell is the media car­ing so much?”  That's all I hear now–Saddam this, Bush that, blah, blah, blah.  Oh, and Bush obvi­ously can't answer unscripted ques­tions.  We already knew that, but it still is the case–no change there.  This whole Sad­dam thing just puts this men­tal image in my head: Sad­dam in a gilded cage, sent from Wash­ing­ton to Texas(?) with an attached tag, writ­ten in crayon with sev­eral back­ward let­ters: “To: daddy, From: li'l shrub, Merry X-Mas.”  Sure, you did this For Great Jus­tice.  No per­sonal vendetta for that whole attempted-daddy-killing there, lit­tle Bush, I'm sure. 

Am I a ter­ror­ist yet for crit­i­ciz­ing the gov­ern­ment?  Admit­tedly, I am talk­ing bad about the peo­ple, not the insti­tu­tion.  I respect the posi­tion, just not the man in that posi­tion.  Is it Novem­ber yet?

XML val­i­da­tion is kick­ing my ass today.  If you work with XML every day, you should be able to “debug” your own XML in your head and not rely on me to write a crazy col­orized debug­ger for you.  REAL pro­gram­mers don't need colors!

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Tagged as: diedrichs, dreamhost, gallery, saddam, terrorism, war, xml