Chris Meller

I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.

Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.

After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links¹.

Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.

In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.

1. Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should - and does for regular links. ↩

When I originally installed Ubuntu on my DecTOP, I didn’t have any problem booting from a USB flash drive or an external CD drive. Reinstalling Debian on the same box, however, was not quite so easy.

For my own future reference, plus anyone else who may run into the problem, the key is to hold down ESC while the DecTOP POSTs to get it to boot from an external USB drive (at least for a CD drive, presumably a flash drive as well). Shortly you should see a CD-ROM check box appear next to the memory test box and you can let go.

I was stuck re-compiling Apache today to enable support for mod_proxy so I could pass requests through our existing webserver seamlessly to our new PHP5-sporting webserver. Of course I decided to make some other “optimizations” along the way with our Apache configuration, so I ended up breaking everything.

Recompiling Apache threaded of course required that I recompile PHP so it had thread support, and recompiling PHP meant I had to re-tackle the problem of Oracle support in PHP which has always been quite shady anyway.

To make a long story short, one of the things I needed to know was which parameters to pass into each ./configure command. PHP’s handy-dandy phpinfo(); page shows you the configure command used, but I didn’t know off hand how to find out which parameters Apache had been built with.

After poking around in the Apache root directory, I found my answer. Apparently the Apache configure command saves a pretty format of itself every time it’s compiled. On our box at work, I found it in <server_root>/build/config.nice - I presume it’s in a similar location for everyone.

For anyone wondering, yes, I did get mod_proxy up and running, and everything works like a charm. I’ll probably toss together another quick entry tomorrow about our specific use case, since I had to piece together all the information I found from dozens of different sites, none of which seemed to have the whole picture.

In the mean time, happy compiling!

I threw together some screenshots and comments on Flickr while I was quickly giving IE 8 a run through tonight, if anyone’s interested.

IE 8 Beta 1 gallery