This is the second time I’ve been on a train at Camberwell and the driver has opened the doors on the wrong side of the train. The thought process that must take place in the driver’s head during the entire transaction befuddles me.

“Hmm. Platform on left. Must release doors on right. Eeexcellent.”

Time passes…

“Why are all those silly people just standing on the platform? Actually, why are people waving out the non-platform side of the train?? Let’s put a stop to that tomfoolery!”

The right doors close. The left doors remain locked. People inside the train start to panic. More time passes…

“Oh!! I know what I need to do!”

The doors on both sides unlock.

Have you upgraded your Debian installation from Etch to Lenny? I have. Are you somewhat surprised to find things breaking because the apache-perl binary has disappeared? I was.

The simple answer according to Debian bug #496497 is that Apache 1.3 has been removed. Debian Etch appears to be the last distribution to support it.

To me, this is a surprise. Surely Apache 1.3 is still heavily in production use around the world. The possibility that it could be at this point of abandonment—the point of not even offering it in packages—didn’t even occur to me. That’s why I wasted so much time trying to “un-break” my installation.

So in short, if your code base relies on Apache 1.3 and you upgrade from Etch, you’re out of luck. You need to roll back, or possibly compile and install everything by hand, or start looking at migrating from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.0. Bug #482648 offers a temporary workaround which I’ve not yet tried.

I have mixed feelings about this. In a way it’s probably good that the migration from 1.3 to 2.0 is being forced upon us. In another way though, how does one propose this migration to higher business powers in a way that doesn’t sound like a complete waste of resources?

At worst, managers reject the migration and developers are stuck with Etch. But then with the exception of backported packages, all future improvements to Debian are essentially immaterial. Should a code base ever lock things down to that degree?

EdgeCurve.com runs a semi-regular game where a photo is posted and people compete to submit the funniest caption for it. Take a look at the archives to get an idea of the pictures and captions submitted in the past.

At some point it was decided that archived entries should feature a banner ad between their photos and their captions. I don’t think these ads were ever expected to trump the user-submitted captions in awesomeness though.

This was taken from round #197. Presumably the ads are selected based on the text content of the page (i.e. the user-submitted captions). Google’s ad servers have obviously seen all this talk of digging, eco-friendliness and planting bulbs, and selected what seems to be the right ad for the target audience. They probably don’t know how spot-on they were in this instance.

If wins aren’t your thing (and perhaps while not at work), check out the FAIL Blog and Shipment of Fail.

The other day I discovered just how much of other people’s junk we have lying around at the DP desk, and I figured we needed to do something about it. When I got home that day, creativity struck and this was the result:

I built this using OpenOffice.org Draw. Lost Property Woman™ is a randomly generated face from monoface. I wanted something attention-getting enough that people would notice it stuck to the wall rather than just write it off as one more meaningless poster out the corner of their eye.

They seem to be working too—people are coming to collect their lost property.

The people in the Design labs (who also seem to be the source of most of our lost property) seemed to be the most interested by the posters as I was putting them up. They were all rather bubbly and excited as they gathered around the pile, which amused me quite a bit. Apparently the posters in those labs have since been defaced and had to be pulled down. Oh, those crazy Design students.