Tag Archives: error

Your MOM was Photoshopped!

Door: This Is Not A Door. So, remember this photo of a door labeled “This is not a door?” Last year, someone else sent a picture of the same door to FAIL Blog. Then a week ago, someone submitted mine to Friends of Irony, where Katie spotted it a few days later.

Here’s where things get interesting.

On both sites, people were absolutely convinced that it was “obviously” photoshopped.

*headdesk*

No, it’s real. It’s in a small business complex at the corner of Newport Ave. and Irvine Blvd. in Tustin, California. You can go there and look if you want. And of course there are the two photos taken from different angles.

The obvious conclusion is that people don’t really know how to tell whether a photo has been manipulated. At least on FAIL Blog, some of the doubters had reasons, even though they amounted to not understanding perspective.

I was tempted to post a comment linking to this XKCD strip (My hobby: insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped), but settled for requesting a photo credit instead.

Posted in Computers/Internet, Signs of the Times, You Must be Mistaken | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Starbuck(’)s Coffee

Starbucks sign with an apostrophe removed

I found this sign on the day after National Punctuation Day. You can still see the residue from the adhesive where the extra apostrophe was attached.

Someone clearly got Starbucks Coffee confused with Starbuck’s coffee. Of course, in some cases, they could be the same thing:


Flickr photo by amidalasrogue

Posted in Photos, You Must be Mistaken | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

When digiKam Failed to Connect

In the decade I’ve been using Linux, it’s gone from something that required lots of technical know-how just to set up, to something that (in its major flavors) can auto-detect most hardware and provides friendly GUIs for most configuration tasks. But every once in a while, I have the kind of experience that would turn a new user off of Linux. Usually because Fedora has decided to change something during an update.

In this case, it was a digital camera problem. Since we bought our Canon PowerShot SD600 last December, I’ve used KDE’s digiKam to transfer and manage the photos. DigiKam detected the camera and accessed the photos right out of the box, no configuration needed beyond telling it to remember the model. But something changed in the last two weeks, and last night I started getting an error message: Failed to connect to the camera. Oddly enough, it could still detect the camera when it was connected. But it couldn’t display or download the images.

I searched all over, hitting dead end after dead end, until I got a hint that it was a permissions problem. Continue reading

Posted in Linux, Troubleshooting | Tagged , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Generic Novel-ty

Found this on Amazon a few months ago while looking for something by Neil Gaiman:

Amazon listing for Gaiman Mid Grade Novel

I just checked back and the listing is gone. I figure it was probably a placeholder or something.

Posted in You Must be Mistaken | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

“Expected dict” Errors in FDF Acrobat Forms

Today I was trying to fix a problem in a section of a website that hadn’t been changed in roughly 5 years. The page in question retrieved data from a database and filled out an Acrobat form using FDF. Under some circumstances, Adobe Reader would generate an error message, “Expected a dict object.” Then it would freeze, and crash the web browser for good measure.

This site was built with ColdFusion, and used a then-freely-available library called PDFFormFiller.cfm (I can’t find any sign of it now) to generate the FDF code. After saving the offending FDF to a file (eliminating the browser as a factor), I started manually editing the code to see what happened.

The problem turned out to be parentheses appearing in the form data. FDF uses parentheses-delimited strings, and it was finding ) in the code and trying to parse what was left as FDF tokens. The solution was simple: just escape the parentheses as \( or \). Continue reading

Posted in Troubleshooting, Web Design | Tagged , , , , , , , | 16 Comments

Apache, mod_ssl, and syntax errors in krb5.h

Upgraded the Apache web server today. I’d forgotten about a problem compiling mod_ssl on some systems. Fortunately I had left myself a note about it.

If you get syntax errors in krb5.h while trying to build Apache with mod_ssl, it’s probably because your Linux distribution puts the Kerberos include files in their own subdirectory (Red Hat/Fedora and derivatives do this), and the configure script has somehow missed them.

Solution: Configure mod_ssl and Apache as normal. Then edit the file path_to_apache_source/src/modules/ssl/Makefile. Look for the CFLAGS1 line and add -I/usr/kerberos/include to it.

Then continue with the build as normal.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Posted in Troubleshooting, Web | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Open Letter to WordPress Plugin Authors

Please, when developing your plugins, be sure to always use the full opening tag for PHP:

<?php code goes here ?>

On some servers—maybe even your own—you can shorten this to just the opening <?. The following line in php.ini will disable this “feature,” and many web server administrators do so to simplify things like generating XML with PHP:

short_open_tag = Off

When this option is set, PHP will ignore <? and assume it’s simply part of the template… along with all the code following it. If you’re lucky, it means a bunch of PHP code gets sent to the web browser. If you’re not lucky, it results in invalid syntax, and PHP grinds to a halt, spitting out a blank page and a PHP Parse Error.

So please make sure you always use the full opening tag so that your plugin will be compatible with everyone’s system. If you run your own server, set that option in php.ini so that if you miss one, you can catch it before you post it.

Posted in Computers/Internet | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment