January 2012 Archives

I was placed in a situation of updating and redeploying a PHP application on an older IIS 6 server. I have some small experience with PHP, but none at all with IIS (only Apache). One thing that I feel is very important that I know not everyone cares about is having clean URLs, or at least, removing the extension of dynamic pages. I don't know why a user to a website should have to see and know (when typing) whether my page is implemented in PHP, ASP, ASPX, JSP, or whatever. Typically I also like to remove .html as well, but actually I feel you can go either way on that one (because HTML is the content type the browser sees, not a backend). In this case the site was already moving URLs, and the long-term move away from PHP was also possible. I didn't want to risk having to break bookmarks again in the future.

Normally in Apache I would turn on MultiViews and also rely on default files like index.htm/php. While IIS 6 supports default files, it doesn't support MultiViews as far as I can tell. My searching didn't find much workarounds. I did find Ionic's Isapi Rewrite Filter though, which bascially is an open-source mod_rewrite for IIS. Read on for details on my configuration.

At work, I and the other software developers work primarily with the Java programming language. Part of our organization's goal involves algorithms and scientific data analysis of data sets, which is researched by another team. Traditionally there has been a lot of data analysis and scientific work with Matlab, but since the team has switched to Python. Python appears to have a strong scientific community and tools (such as pythonxy) for rapid development for scientific computing, data analysis, and data visualization. Since then, I have looked at ways where we can collaborate by running their algorithms in the JVM, without the need for costly and error-prone porting to Java. Ideally I'd like a way for the Python code to leverage a codebase developed over 8 years for our problem domain, and for Java code to leverage new work being done in Python.

Read on for my current progress...

Short answer for the web searchers: if /usr/bin/emacs points to jove, install emacs.

I've had the privilege of starting to play around with Angstrom (fork of OpenEmbedded) on the BeagleBone. I needed to build some bleeding-edge software with bitbake on an Ubuntu 10.10 but I ran into an interesting problem. When building the distribution, it builds all of the tools from the ground up, including automake. However, automake would crash when building some sort of support for emacs with a jove crash. I couldn't understand how they were related.

In the end, I found that since jove was installed but Emacs was not, /usr/bin/emacs actually pointed to starting jove. Automake was trying to use some kind of compiler for emacs (I guess it was making some emacs macros or syntax thing?). It must have thought emacs was properly installed and called Jove with a set of parameters that caused it to crash. In the end, the solution was to install Emacs. The build system itself wasn't in error, it was my machine, so it can't be reasonably "fixed" in the code so I put this post in hopes of people finding it if they search for the same problem.