I encountered a problem with an application I was working on the other day that was running on a machine with an older version of PHP (version 4.2.3 I believe). Essentially, the problem was with trying to set the PHP ini variable error_prepend_string. What this variable is supposed to do is the following:

Suppose I have the following blip of code:

1
2
3
4
5

    $arr = array(0 => 'zero', 1 => 'one', two => 'Two?');
 
    for ($n = 0; $n < sizeof($arr); $n++) {
        echo '['.$n.'] => "'.$arr[$n].'"<br />';
    }

For anyone that knows PHP, they will undoubtedly realize that their output will look like the following:

[0] => "zero"
[1] => "one"
[2] => "" [b]Notice: [/b] Undefined index: <strong>2</strong> in <strong>/www/code/file.php</strong> on line <strong>5</strong>

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Well, Tom is finally here. Last night was his first night in our apartment and from what I can tell he enjoyed the futon we bought him. When we picked him up yesterday (which was 20 minutes earlier than his flight was supposed to get in - go American Airlines!), we went to eat at The Hobbit Cafe. They are a truly awesome place in downtown Houston and I recommend anyone go down to check them out. As you might imagine they are based on the Lord of the Rings, which is truly awesome. There’s only one other place I know kinda like that called Rivendell in San Marcos, but they definitely don’t serve the same things as The Hobbit Cafe. Rivendell is more like a bakery than anything.

Anywho, afterwards we headed home, only to stop at Main Event - a gigantic place filled with Bowling, Pool, poker, arcades and lastertag. They had some cool arcade games, but it was too loud for me - I got a headache after being in there for about 30 minutes. The games were also too expensive - I like Mr. Gatti’s games for a quarter - that’s the way it was MEANT to be.

I fell asleep in the car, but at least it was only for 30-45 minutes. It nevertheless caused me great grief when I was trying to go to bed later on in the evening.

Tom’s back at home and later tonight we’ll begin our usual working madness - I’ll be playing with the new VoIP phones that I got in (though I have to wait for the router that will let it work on the internet) and coding the shopping cart that I need to do for a couple of our clients.

Anywho, cya later.

This is for a Debian system, but should work for any Linux box. The essential problem is that whenever you run an update for the nVidia drivers or xOrg or your Kernel, you might not be able to get into X. After laboriously trying to figure out still why X doesn’t load, you go to Google and miraculously come here. Then, you continue reading to find the solution.

Starting in xOrg version 7, they are no longer using the /usr/X11R6 as the primary directory for all the X stuff. They still have some lingering items in there, but the move towards /usr/lib/xorg is happening very quickly. As such, the traditional nVidia driver installer is still trying to use the /usr/X11R6 rather than the new /usr/lib/xorg as the directory to install it’s glx module into.

So, here’s what happens when you update your drivers. nVidia compiles it and installes the nvidia module hopefully in the proper location, but the glx module does not get put in the proper directory. So, when you try to start X after loading the new nvidia module, you get logs that look like the following:

/var/log/Xorg.0.log

--snip--
 
(II) Loading sub module "GLcore"
(II) LoadModule: "GLcore"
(WW) Warning, couldn't open module GLcore
(II) UnloadModule: "GLcore"
(II) UnloadModule: "glx"
(II) Unloading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
(EE) Failed to load module "glx" (a required submodule could not be loaded, 0)
(II) LoadModule: "int10"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libint10.so
(II) Module int10: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 7.0.0, module version = 1.0.0
        ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 0.8
(II) LoadModule: "record"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/librecord.so
(II) Module record: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 7.0.0, module version = 1.13.0
        Module class: X.Org Server Extension
        ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 0.2
(II) Loading extension RECORD
(II) LoadModule: "type1"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/fonts/libtype1.so
(II) Module type1: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 7.0.0, module version = 1.0.2
        Module class: X.Org Font Renderer
        ABI class: X.Org Font Renderer, version 0.4
(II) Loading font Type1
(II) LoadModule: "vbe"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvbe.so
(II) Module vbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 7.0.0, module version = 1.1.0
        ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 0.8
(II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
(WW) Warning, couldn't open module nvidia
(II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
(EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module does not exist, 0)
(II) LoadModule: "kbd"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/kbd_drv.so
(II) Module kbd: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 7.0.0, module version = 1.0.1
        Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
        ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 0.5
(II) LoadModule: "mouse"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/mouse_drv.so
(II) Module mouse: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 7.0.0, module version = 1.0.4
        Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
        ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 0.5
(EE) No drivers available.
 
Fatal server error:
no screens found

Great, so first you notice glx is unable to be loaded and then nvidia can’t be loaded. Now what to do? Well, time to go back and recompile the nVidia driver with new options.

Basically, you need to point the installer at the new modules directory. Don’t try to run the installer with the ‘–x-prefix’ directive, as the nVidia driver won’t compile correctly. You need to run the following command:

#> ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run -anN --x-module-path=/usr/lib/xorg/modules

You don’t technically need the ‘-anN’ on the front, but I used it to auto accept the license and not to download updates from the nVidia website (I was having problems with the internet at the time). It should compile correctly and install in the proper place.

Cheers.

My best friend Tom King and I had been planning on the possibility of having him coming down if one of our Cerberus clients ended up signing a complete network, VoIP, and internet deal with us. A BIG score for our company - but we are still in the works with them. The head honcho (at least the manager, not the owner) is really against change - especially when it comes to technology. I got this tip from one of the elderly workers who really does like technology, seemingly, and is really excited about the possibility of getting a better internet connection, etc. She told me that he absolutely hates technology and sticks to a policy of

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Nevertheless, I have been working my ass off recently to try to get this contract with them, as it will finally launch us into the markets we’ve been trying to get into the past few months. It’s taken a lot of research and mapping out of their buildings, but I have a fairly good idea of everything, and it’s gonna cost them (and us) big bucks to get it done - but it’ll be worth it.

Back to the main point, though. Even though we haven’t got the contract with them yet, Tom up and decided that he wanted to come to College Station to hang out. He was looking at tickets for a week from now and they were ungodly expensive (like, $800+ round-trip). I told him to check prices for tickets for tomorrow - and he found tickets much to his liking. 1 way from Nashville to Houston via Southwest was $250. But I told him he could do better and that he should look for tickets on Continental’s main page from Nashville directly into College Station. $220! Unfortunately, in order for him to be able to use frequent flyer miles so he wouldn’t have to pay out of pocket, he’s coming down Tuesday. *snaps fingers*.

I’m still so excited that on a whim I went out with Melissa and bought a futon - and luckily we found one we wanted at the first place we went too. It wasn’t too badly priced, either - $200 before the 10% Aggie Discount WHOOP! It should be delivered Monday - and it now has a nice place made ready in our office.

It’s been only about 6 months since I’ve seen Tom last, and he has been in Japan for the past month (I still envy him for that). But, it’ll be good for us since he’s gonna be my best man at Melissa and my wedding this Christmas. Being a third of the way across the country makes it hard for us to be close friends (in respect to being able to hang out all the time), but we’ve still managed to stay in close contact and be best buds regardless of distance. That’s why I’m really glad to have a friend like him.

Well, I’m officially demoing Windows Vista Beta 2 and it was a serious pain to install on VMWare 5.0. For starters, when I initially finished the installation, there were not graphics drivers loaded, so it used its standard, which maxes out at 800×600 and 4-bit resolution - talk about yucky. Also, there were several other drivers missing, including ethernet, sound, and the aforementioned video drivers.

SOLUTION:
I tried installing the VMWare tools set, but had problems. I found a website online (access it here) that talked about a workaround, only to figure out the reason the tools were not installing were because I had a CD in my drive already. Aparrently, VMWare loads a CD into the drive if you try to install VMWare Tools, but if there’s already a CD in your physical drive (or if you have an ISO loaded), then it doesn’t start the installation. So, after I removed the CD from the drive and verified that I wasn’t using an ISO, I shut down Vista, closed VMWare, then started the entire thing back up again. Once I logged in and closed all extraneous windows, I finally was able to get the drivers installed and batabing bataboom - the usual Windows interface we’re so used to.

Anti-Virus for Vista:
Now I’m currently installing antivirus. McAfee doesn’t have a solution available yet, but Trend Micro has partnered with Microsoft to provide BETA Virus Scan software, though I’m not too terribly concerned about viruses since this is supposed to be a new codeset and invulnerable to many viruses on the internet today - we’ll see how well that holds up. The download for the Trend Micro BETA can be found here.

Graphically, Vista seems very nice. I had originally thought that it was going to mock MacOS X, but it rather seems to have new eye candy while maintaining the original Windows XP look and feel. One of the things that is kind of upsetting me is that many of the usual properties tags have been renamed to things like ‘Personalize’, which throws me off. The configuration panels have all changed, but getting used to the new panels for a techy like me is not that hard at all.

I’ll add more to this entry whenever I’ve had more of a chance to demo it.

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Okay, so day 2 more or less sucked, minus a couple of things. The sessions were more or less mundane and didn’t cover very much. For the most part, I was working on client webpages and trying to get them fixed. Occassionaly I’d pick up a couple of really interesting things, such as SPAM topics and whatever else seemed interesting at the moment.

I did hear about one cool thing called cPGS - or cPanel Game Server. This is the frontend that is an addon to cPanel for being able to resell gameservers. It will be really cool in the future if our company decides to actually get back into the gaming business.

Other than that, more good food was served, but I didn’t benefit too much from the second day of training. I did meet another photographer though and got to see some of his photography (which was pretty good, mind you). I don’t quite remember his name…

So yesterday was the first day of the Training Seminar. It was not as shabby as I thought it might be. I was kind of getting pissed off with the lack of communication they were providing me, so I figured the rest of the conference was gonna suck. There were aspects of it that were rather uninteresting. I’m taking the advanced track, hoping to get a lot out of it (because the beginner track would have definately left me uninterested), but was rather disappointed that a couple of sessions included 5-10 minutes of presentations, then 25-35 minutes of Q&A- and most of the people didn’t have anything to ask.

I was provided free breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday - all of which were mucho delicioso. Lunch was mexican (fajitas and taquitos), and dinner was a filet and a chicken with herbs inside a pie crust with vegetables on the side. Open bar too…not bad at all considering they eliminated the $25 registration fee - meaning the only expense for me is gas seeing as I’m staying with Melissa’s lovely mother. Today I get breakfast and lunch (*types as he munches on a fruit and yogurt parfait*).

Yesterday was also a very wonderful day for interaction, socialization, and trying to make new potential partners and/or clients. Geeks are generally very cool people, and passionate about the topics they talk about - whether it be from old army stories (for the 40+ year-olds), to things they are currently implementing in their infrastructure, to seeing what everyone else’s view about politics are. Most of the people I met yesterday were very cool, especially an old ag who’s been getting into the hosting business. This is odd, but cool at the same time - he’s class of 87, Electrical Engineering. So he’s a graduate of the class 20 years before me - not to mention, he’s had many of the same professors I have (including our advisor Dr. Russell). Oh yea! He was also the president of IEEE his second senior year (practically what I got voted in to!).

Today’s tracks should be more interesting, as well be talking about securing our computers. That’s something I gotta work on…

I’m going to be on my way to Houston tonight to spend my Thursday and Friday sitting in an unknown environment learning about our beloved cPanel program. cPanel is nice - but I think I could make something better. There have been a lot of inconsistencies within the program as you move from one operating system to another, and not to mention I can’t understand why they’d code for one O/S but not another (Debian).

Anywho, I will be without my beloved, and will miss her dearly. But, hopefully this will give me a good chance to network with some people in my field.