Something Odd!

license info – Heard about this on the radio. Fill in the details and you can view their driving license!

Executing scripts/programs from a web page can be troublesome and fraught with security issues. Executing long running scripts is troublesome as well as the webpage appears to never stop loading! Here’s how to get around it in PHP.
Usually I use exec() or system() to run external script but the script I wanted to run this time wasn’t supposed to exit! I had to find another way. I used popen():

$cmd = "command &"
$fp = popen ( $cmd, "r");
sleep( 1 );
pclose($fp);

That will run the command, wait 1 second and then close the pipe to the command. A message on the popen() manual page above warns that file descriptors may be left open and the Apache process may not respond to further queries but I haven’t tested that.

Yes! Mozilla can edit html comments in textareas! Now I can edit the template in Galeon without starting up Netscape!
Update! But it screws up hyper links. It’s probably *correct* in doing so but that behaviour is very annoying! I’ll have to keep Netscape around for occasional usage still.

Galeon 1.2.6 released! Woo! Must go take a look!

Google Search: “go to hell” – check out the first link! Didn’t Google do something similar a few years ago?

Roland Tanglao’s Weblog looks like a good source of developer information.

o r g a n i c a – another weblog ecology site.