Where I’m @

20060328

PHP and CURL on Windows
We have been bit by this dead bee before, that trying to use CURL on a Windows machine fails with the maddening error Unable to load dynamic library in 'path/to/extensions/php_curl.dll'. This time, we are determined to record the solution so we can retrieve it next time. Turns out that libeay.dll and ssleay.dll need to be copied into %systemroot%\system32\ (or somewhere else in your PATH), or CURL will not work. We wish deeply that there were a better error message, like, say “libeay.dll [or ssleay.dll] not found”. Which is itself not a model of a modern major error message, but it speaks to the problem more than the current one.

posted by Tk at 17:14 • • sealed in amber

20060324

Bugzilla Permissions
We recently moved our development server from one set of hardware to another, and when using Bugzilla on the new machine, we encountered a permissions omission that we needed to note for future reference. (We may encounter more, and this will serve as a starting point for troubleshooting.) IUSR_[machine name] needs to have Modify permission to the Bugzilla data directory, most likely found in bugzilla\data. (In our defense, we try to run web apps with tight security, and the Bugzilla doco does not deal with IIS permissions in any granular manner.) We run Bugzilla 2.20, and Bugzilla team has declared an intent to permit the data files to be placed out of the webroot in the future, so that path may well change.

posted by Tk at 10:05 • • sealed in amber

20060320

Adware Executable
Our Symantec System Center this morning notifed us that it had found and quarantined as adware a file from one of our users’ desktop’s backup. Since we did not see the executable at the Symantec Antivirus Research Center (SARC) webpage and googling it (ditto newsgroups) did not bring back any results, we are posting it here for future reference. The name of the executable is bbsetupdb.exe, and once that user comes in and we have a chat, we’ll make a note of what she thought it was and where she thought she might have gotten it.

posted by Tk at 08:48 • • sealed in amber

20060309

Truly Random RecordSets in ASP
We were having a dickens of a time trying to figure out why our SQL would be generating randomly ordered results every time when run in MS Access, but not in our ASP page. Eventually, we thought we had found it with 15 Seconds’ article on this topic. But no. Some little piece was missing. Then we came across Ken Schaefer’s writings on getting random records and we saw that we could be ordering the results by referring numerically to one of the items in the SELECT clause. So sue us, we never knew about that. Or had forgotten. Probably the latter. [cough, cough]

So anyway, the other half of the key, which we had tried before, was generating a random number in the VBScript and jamming it into the SQL statement. Our end product:

' generate random number for randomizing SQL
Dim intRandomNumber
Randomize()
intRandomNumber = Int( 1000 * Rnd ) + 1
sql = "SELECT Rnd( " & -1 * ( intRandomNumber ) & "
* numericID ), numericID 
FROM tableName
ORDER BY 1"

posted by Tk at 18:31 • • sealed in amber