blog.arithm

If you develop in PHP on Emacs, then you’ve probably got a hook setup to run flymake-mode on PHP files. And if so, then you’ve probably noticed that this doesn’t work with nXhtml, which will often return an error like “mumamo can’t find the file” (or some such), causing flymake-mode to disable itself.

The culprit is likely to be a bind like this:

(add-hook 'php-mode-hook (lambda () (flymake-mode t)))

which says, “turn on flymake-mode when php-mode is started. (Sacha Chua has a post that recommends using this from couple of years back.) The problem, as far as I can tell, is that nXhtml tries to process the fleetingly available _flymake file rather than the original PHP script whenever it toggles into php-mode.

A better hook to use is the find-file-hook, like this:

(add-hook 'find-file-hook 'flymake-mode)

With this, Flymake will properly validate PHP chunks in nXhtml mode, as well as any other files that Flymake is smart enough to process.

Yeah, so even if you turn off basic authentication and specify a different auth method, Apache (at least some versions of it) still looks around for an auth file and throws a “pcfg_openfile() called with NULL” error when it can’t find one.  To fix, set the user auth file to /dev/null:

AuthBasicAurhorative off
AuthUserFile /dev/null


Or you can just ignore the errror I suppose. It looks more serious than it is.

Mantis is apparently on an Emacs-esque release schedule.  Two years of work gives us 1.2.0.  This release includes a new, and long-needed, plugin repository.

These days I spend most of my time in Trac, though I long for a switch back to Mantis.

On a couple of occasions now I have accidentally installed ntop, a web-based “top” clone for network monitoring, when really I want iftop, with it’s libcurses-based command-line goodness. The web thing is cool and all, and I’ve got nothing against it’s suite of dependencies, such as graphvis, however when I’m frantically installing a network visualizer — which generally means that bad shit is going down on some box over which I’ve formally had little control — then I really do need to know what’s happening *right this second*. Hence iftop.

I think iftop used to be called ntop on some distros, which is why I keep mixing them up.

Instead of etc-update.   So.  Much.  Easier.

Why can’t Gentoo come up with easy-to-remember command names.  Like “updateallthedamnconffiles -anddontaskanystupidquestions“.

I’m going to spend the morning aliasing.

Getting the following message when trying to use Flymake with PHP?:

“Flymake: Configuration error occurred while running. Flymake will be switch OFF”

This threw me, though it probably shouldn’t have. If you’re seeing it as well, double check two settings in your php.ini file:

1. The error_reporting setting needs to include E_PARSE. I personally like to use error_reporting = E_ALL | E_STRICT. This shows everything that the PHP compiler thinks you are doing wrong.

2. Also double check your php.ini file for display_errors = On. I almost always forget about this when setting up on a new box because I tend to override php.ini with .htaccess values.

Finally, triple check your command line php settings with a quick $ php -i, which dumps the content of phpinfo() to the command line.

Everytime I install Cygwin I find myself rooting around for the “more” command. It’s been removed in favor of “less”, however I prefer “more”. It’s more or less (ha! Linux humor!) a simpler pager.

Install the util-linux package for a random collection of older utilities, including “more” and “whereis”.

Believe it.  And good luck getting any details from the Magic Eight Ball known as Rackspace technical support.

Ymacs: http://www.ymacs.org/

I just spent a few minutes playing around with it. Missing a ton of key bindings, and the all-important butterfly-mode, but it definitely feels like you’re in Emacs.

It’s kind of an eerie feeling.

How moooving.

As seen on 2d code.