ForTheLose

My signed XKCD Volume 0 has arrived, and I am extremely happy!  After some delay and a still-ongoing conversation with whoever manages orders, I have received my copy and I am probably buying a few more because this thing is awesome.

There’s a bunch of puzzles and commentary and such in the book with a nice glossy cover and pretty well formatted pages.  My current nitpick is that not all article titles are around either to save space or because they’re usually unnecessary, but its still something I would’ve liked.

If you’re a friend reading this and have no idea what XKCD is then perhaps we should stop discussing things check it out here!

I will post pics whenever I find my camera.

I recently set up a Windows Server 2008 x64 system using PHP 5.2.10 (soon to use 5.3.0, waiting for an upgrade of the memcache extension), and discovered that PHP running under FastCGI to talk to Apache performs alarmingly slower than on Windows Server 2003 (x86).  Looking for a way back to performance bliss, I took a look at SAPI again.

It could be a configuration change, a side effect of using x64 edition, or a number of other reasons since the changes between Server 2008 and 2003 are so large.  PHP on Windows has never really had a lot of love unless you’re willing to shell out incredibly massive amounts of cash for Zend’s proprietary offering, but frankly I could just use IIS 7 over that if I really wanted to.

Changing the way PHP communicates with Apache, from FastCGI to SAPI, results in an incredible speed increase and stability increase.  I will be spending time to look for reasons to this, as I am still unsure of the actual cause.  I will also try SAPI again for Server 2003 and see if, maybe, it’s just a FastCGI deal with Windows that I was previously unaware of.

After having Fallout 3 on Steam for close to a year I have discovered that it no longer runs, with “xlive.dll” being the faulting problem in it, which is for Games for Windows Live, some sort of lame excuse for achievements and stuff from Microsoft.

Disabling it is actually not a fun treat, but thankfully there’s an application out there that will do it for you: Games for Windows Live Disabler v1.2.2 provided by Fallout Nexus

Wordpress is only the beginning of this site I think, but I might stick with wordpress and just convert my theme to WP templates, which should be a real big pain in the butt.

What am I talking about? Check out dev.forthelose.net. Enjoy it. Savor it. It’s using PHP5, PDO, and a framework/library called LucidPHP I’m developing with a gentleman named Robin Burchell.  More news on this stuff later

Greetings,

I’m Chris, and this is my personal blag blog.  I’ve held a few blogs before this, and none of them have been an accomplishment in my mind (I just post a few random things and then neglect them).  They have also been resoundingly boring.  I hope to correct both of these issues with my current blog and upcoming one as well (Wordpress is just a temporary thing, I think).

I should note here that at the end of all my posts I will write a “tl;dr” or “cliffnotes version” of my posts for people who are only interested in the meat of a post.

The audience of this blog is intended to be my close friends and those I think will find some interest in my words.  I will tend to talk about many things that people will find uncomfortable, such as religion and philosophy.  I will also tend to talk about many things people will find boring, such as programming and EVE Online.   Under no circumstances do my opinions reflect those of my friends or my employer, past or present.  I can’t stress enough that this blog will say things many people likely won’t like to hear, and I will certainly not hold back my opinion for fear of reprocussions.

As one of my personal favorite web-comics states:

Cliffnotes Version:
Hi, I’m new and I plan on staying.