Autarchy of the Private Cave

Drupal technical introduction
It’s quite old, but as it describes core functionality, it should be still actual.

Please comment if you know of any other good high-quality technical Drupal introductions/descriptions.

Have you voted already?

Must have been some maintenance, as I didn’t notice any changes in PHP/MySQL versions since the 7th of March.

Update: it seems as though since that short MySQL outage everything is faster at GoDaddy shared hosting. Did they upgrade database server(s)? I have no idea, but I like the change.

Ukraine is the most dangerous country in Europe. That is, in terms of road safety and driving culture (or, to be more precise, the lack of both).

In 2007 in Ukraine, there were over 62 000 road accidents with over 9 000 killed and 77 000 injured.
This is 20% increase comparing to 2006.
And this is also almost two people dead from road accidents per 10000 of population, and 16(!) people injured per 10000 of population.
Based on these numbers, every Ukrainian is (on average) at 0.16% risk of being injured and at 0.02% risk of being killed in a road accident.

(An increase in the number of new cars sold in 2007 relative to 2006 was 46.1%: from 371000 sold in 2006, up by 171000 to 542000 new cars sold in 2007.)

On average, road kill accidents take 3-8 times more lives in Ukraine, then in other European countries.

If you visit Ukraine – watch out for reckless, drunken, stupid, blind, ignorant drivers and violating, unpredictable, dummy pedestrians.

The further from the Kyiv’s downtown you are – the more watchful you should be.

This post used the numbers from this press-release (in Ukrainian).

Earlier, I wrote about Universal boot CD , which is targeted primarily at the hardware testing/diagnosing.

If not hardware, but “only” software is malfunctioning – try SystemRescueCD, a Linux-based recovery CD/DVD/Flash stick (it all depends on how you burn/install the downloaded file – manuals and how-to’s are available).

As always, Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with SystemRescueCD, and gain no profit from this post. Any advice I give is provided AS IS, with no guarantees of fitness to your exact case.

Found useful list and discussion of the complimentary closings.

It’s the “complimentary close” or “complimentary closing” that business writers are wondering about, those phrases that come before the signature in a letter:

1. Very truly yours,
2. Respectfully,
3. Yours truly,
4. Sincerely yours,
5. Sincerely,
6. Best regards,
7. Regards,
8. Cordially,
9. With many thanks,
10. Warm wishes,

Note: this post is based on the comment by Simon, who generously shared his experience.

Step-by-step:

• Download the compiled ffmpeg with libmp3lame support (direct download links: older version ffmpeg.with.lame and newer version ffmpeg.2007-10-28.with-libmp3lame-support).
• Rename the downloaded executable file to “ffmpeg” (no extension), upload it to the directory on your server (in this example /home/myusername/).
• Download libmp3lame.so.0.
• Upload libmp3lame.so.0 to the same directory where you placed ffmpeg in.
• Create a php file with the following code (remember to change the paths to your own, where you actually uploaded binaries in previous steps):
  1. <?php
  2. exec("export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/myusername/");
  3. echo passthru("/home/myusername/ffmpeg -formats");
  4. ?>
• If you access that PHP file with your browser, you should be able to see a list of formats which are supported by ffmpeg, and if you find “EA libmp3lame” somewhere in the output, then it means you now can Encode Audio in libmp3lame!
• If that doesn’t work for you: LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be a protected variable in PHP (you can check for this by searching for the “safe_mode_protected_env_vars” value in phpinfo() output). The workaround here can be to write your commands to a file from php, then chmod that file with 0755 permissions (rwx-rx-rx), and run the file through exec(). In this way, PHP is not changing the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but telling the server to run a file, which tells the server to change it. This method worked for the original author of these instructions.

For passing arguments to the PHP wrapper script – check out PHP’s $argv variable (more on this here). If you decided to use shell-script as a wrapper for “export LD_LIBRARY_PATH”, then using $1, $2 etc will allow you to pass parameters to the shell script, e.g. in the example below

you could pass “input file” as first argument, “parameters” as second and “output file” as third to make such a wrapper script work.