hahaha, I fucking hate PHP.

But I finally got a Meimei instance running on someone else’s machine. God, there are so many fucking differences between PHP installs. It’s bloody ridiculous. The damn thing worked fine on my Dreamhost account last weekend, but they’re running Apache with mod_php (I think?). It looks like the guy who put this instance up is running Lighttpd (and possibly a different minor version of PHP).

And it doesn’t help that the language is such a fucking mess. There were a couple of really stupid fucking mistakes (res instead of ret) that would have been caught at compile time by a real language rather than this toy. Maybe I’ve just been pampered too much?

On the work front, we’ve got 5 days to put together a mobile version of our main web site (in PHP, of course — how the fuck did I turn into a fucking PHP web developer). God that shit’s pretty fucking bad; at least it’s easy “lol let’s generate sum html codez” rather than Meimei which is batshit insane from any perspective.

Goddamn I need another drink.

So I started watching I got trolled into watching Maria+Holic. Despite the fact that the genre doesn’t usually appeal to me I can’t stop fucking watching it. It’s kind of disturbing how enthralled I am by it. lol faggots.

Rimi hit the 100mbps bandwidth limit last night, which is quite the incentive to finish up work on Meimei. I’ve got the script and installer done (I think) — I just need to put the auto-update functionality in and write the Haskell-based load balancer and she should be all set to deploy. Hopefully that’ll take some of the strain off Rimi without being too much of a pain.

Finally, Drupal can suck my fucking balls. I’ve known for a long time that CMS’s are shitty, I just wasn’t able to comprehend how shitty they could possibly be. Now I know (and have to put up with it, unfortunately). Ugh.

If you remember back, some of our sister libraries have incompetitent system administers or something. I’ve been spending today migrating some of our legacy systems off one of their old machines (ie, scraping it lol) and while I was waiting for my scripts to go I decided to poke around the machine again.

A quick svn st in the cgi-local directory showed that someone had dropped something in there named sys.pl. Popped open the file in vi and saw that it was a CGI-Telnet instance (with the default password still set lol). So I popped open a web browser and logged in.

Now, there isn’t that much you can do with the apache user (or any other limited user), and really, I think they’ve gotten used to having the machine hacked. Breaking into the damn thing is fairly trivial — it’s got a soft and chewy outside. Today’s goal was to take a bite out of the soft and chewy center and get myself root access to really scare the shit out of their pants (especially since their production svn repo is hosted on this machine).

Unfortunately, it took me all of 20 seconds to root the box. /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf is owned by the apache user, which means I just had to change the User/Group directives to run as root/wheel and crash+restart Apache to get root. It was so boring I didn’t even bother try doing it. So I told my boss and had a good laugh about it, followed by a quick-spoken “our services are off that machine, right?”

Yeah, they’re off that machine.

I love caramel.

Oh man Katsucon is tomorrow — going to be a royal shitfest.

Anyway so I’m rewriting one of our websites in PHP (with Drupal). PHP is a pile of shit, but honestly if I were to write the thing in Haskell no one would be able to maintain it. And PHP is a big step up from what it’s currently written in — ColdFusion.

I had written a couple of little widgets in ColdFusion to pull feeds from a couple databases for shit, and I wanted to port those over to my Drupal installation. So I poke around in the ColdFusion code looking for it, and wtf my code isn’t there — it’s just static HTML once again (in the past, the “feeds” have always been updated by hand). A quick look in the svn log –

————————————————————————
r3717 | Coworker_A | 2009-01-29 10:42:50 -0500 (Thu, 29 Jan 2009) | 1 line

manually updating “Classes” section; Taro’s dynamic piece is not ready–Coworker_B needs to do a ColdFusion piece to go with it
————————————————————————
r3716 | Taro | 2009-01-29 10:30:27 -0500 (Thu, 29 Jan 2009) | 2 lines

Changed upcoming classes on the index page to dynamically pull the first three upcoming events from the database and display them on the page.

The “ColdFusion piece to go with it” wasn’t so much a piece as it was “please refactor I suck at ColdFusion”. The thing worked perfectly fine, and he just bloody wiped it out and replaced it with static HTML (the exact same HTML that the widget generated). So now I’m sitting around waiting for the checkout of revision 3716 to complete because I was too lazy to look up how to pull a single file from the repo to reference the code.

RAAAAAAGGGGGEEEEE

I kind of miss FrozenVoid :(

Also I think writing PHP for 8 hours/day has fucking destroyed my libido. I swear I looked at (what I would have previously considered) an attractive young women today and thought “I bet she’s type juggling a penis.” In retrospect, that sounds kind of hot. FUCK HASKELL COME BACK DON’T LEAVE ME WHY DID YOU HAVE TO DIE