Aquarionics

This is how debian Woody (and all sane systems) clean up PHP disk based (the default) sessions:

1. Every x (default: 1000) requests, PHP will delete all outdated sessions.

   This is how Debian Sarge does it:

2. Every half hour (at 9 and 39 past) run a script
3. This script runs a second shell script that parses the PHP config file with a regex to get the value for how long sessions should last (Which is odd, because a PHP script will get this automatically)
4. The first script will then find all session files older than that value

1. Delete them.

   WHY? WHY WHY WHY?

   This is the kind of braindead overcomplication stuff I’d expect from Gentoo, but the whole point of Debian is that it’s /sane/.

Okay, The folks that I work for are looking for a PHP developer/Sysadminny type person in order to do, you know, stuff. For money. It’s a decent company, so if you are – or know of anyone – looking for that kind of thing in Bedford-type area, you could do a lot worse than take a look at the advert thing

Here endath the shrillary.

So, I have moved all my crap out of Letchworth and into Bedford, filling one flat and one storage unit. There are photos of the great unpacking at flickr (I did promise my dad digital photos to prove I finished it :-)

Oh, people have asked. The new flat is called “Fortress One” (Following from Geekhouse (Cambridge), Catrion Towers (Reading) and Casarufus (Letchworth). There are three reasons for the current one. The first is that it is possibly the exact opposite of whatever scale you put a fortress on except in regard to the second reason. The second reason is that it’s the first house I’ve ever lived in with a burglar alarm. The third is a self-pitying superman reference, which I’ll spare from those of you who don’t get it already.

I am reflatted, tomorrow I will cycle to work. Time to start again.

It came in the morning, in the post like everything else, along with the bills and the statements and a magazine about something I don’t understand that I apparently asked for at a convention I didn’t go to.

I missed it, to start with, as it was under the CD I had been waiting for for months, but there it was, in a handwritten golden envelope with my name and address clearly marked.

“You are invited to celebrate our wedding, on September 9th in Camelot.”

It was signed “Art and Jenny” as they aways did, and there were instructions to get to the coach, and I wondered how I was going to get back from then.

---

As he went sliding down the corridor – and who had waxed the corridor that morning? – I heard him say a word, and I knew it was the key to the final door, and behind that I would find the numbers. Now, though, I was watching him flail ineffectivly as the corridor tipped him towards the stairs. I turned before he fell though the crack, and wondered if the house would kill me too.

---

I pushed, and the wall slid back at my touch. The walls either side extended smoothly, unpapered and unpainted, revealing windows that looked out over gardens that weren’t in Cambridge. I pushed at the walls between those windows and again the room extended outwards, the crisp summers day outside those windows pulling away as my touch extended the rooms width another dozen feet. It was only seconds it had taken to turn this closet into a room bigger than my entire old flat, and I wondered old the magic that created this house could be, and how much of it I could learn. The room, though, was too big, and I was going to have to find Cath to see how you pulled it back in again. In the meantime, though, I went to get another door from the garage. I wanted to explore that garden.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

In The Beginning was the Command Line just in case you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it recently.