I completely agree with this. On Safari, even UNDO doesn’t work in a textarea! Every post is one miskeyed “select all” away from complete destruction. At least WP lets me save and keep on editing…

(via)

So is fsockopen just completely hosed in PHP 4.3.4 or what? I have a friend who was happily using FoF for a while, then it stopped working. His host is running PHP 4.3.4, and I suspect they just recently upgraded, and I think that broke fsockopen (which Snoopy uses (which Magpie uses (which FoF uses))). I’ve searched and found some bug reports on fsockopen in 4.3.4, but not quite with the same symptoms. Here’s what I’m seeing:

• fsockopen to ‘127.0.0.1′ or ‘localhost’: works!
• fopen to an http URL on another host: works!
• fsockopen to another host, by name or by IP: fails! No error message is printed or logged. In fact, the script dies so completely that the browser gives a “This document contains no data” error. If you telnet in and type the HTTP request yourself, the server closes the connection before sending back any headers or anything.

At first I thought maybe his host had disabled fsockopen or maybe banned connections to other hosts. But fsockopen is not disabled, it works when connecting to localhost, and fopen works when connecting to any host.

Is this this bug? The symptoms aren’t quite the same. Is there any hope? Any workaround? Or should I just advise him to ask his host to upgrade to 4.3.5?

滅 - Mie4 - Extinguish, Exterminate

Sometimes Jenny randomly starts singing songs. Yesterday she suddenly stood at attention, saluted, and sang this song, then turned around and marched out of the room. It turns out it’s the song she used to have to sing before school every day. I found the full lyrics at this diary of a Taiwanese guy’s experience in the army:

我愛中華 我愛中華 文化悠久 物博地大
開國五千年 五族共一家
中華兒女最偉大
為民族 為國家 奮斗犧牲絕不怕
我們要消滅共匪 復興中華民國

And in English:

I love China! I love China! Its culture is long! Its resources are vast, and land is big!
The country has existed for 5,000 years. Five tribes make one family.
Chinese sons and daughters are the greatest!
For people, for country, we struggle and sacrifice with no fear.
We have to exterminate the communist gang! And revive the Republic of China!

For those of you in other countries, I had to sing this (just the first verse) right after saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning:

My country tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died!
Land of the Pilgrim’s pride!
From every mountain side,
Let freedom ring!

川 - Chuan1 - River

四川 - Si4 Chuan1 - Four Rivers — Sichuan (Szechuan) province

We went to another stupid street fair in New York today, it was a complete bust. Even though it was in Flushing, where Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Indian and Jewish culture and food all swirl together it sill had only the same old stuff as every other street fair. But the trip wasn’t a complete waste: we had some really good 川菜 - Chuan1 Cai4 - Sichuan Food. It was at a place called Szechuan Dynasty, or in Chinese, 蜀霸川菜 - Shu3 Ba4 Chuan1 Cai4 - Shu Tyrant Sichuan Food! (Shu3 is one of the famous Three Kingdoms, and also seems to be another word for “Sichuan”.) You’ve probably had Sichuan food, even if you don’t know it. Like your Kung Pao spicy? That’s Sichuan food.

Jenny’s grandfather was from Sichuan, I think it’s through him that she got her high tolerance of 辣 food. He used to feed Jenny and her sisters spicy duck tongue as a treat. I’m told he also used to eat whole dried roasted chili peppers (Yowza!) as a nice snack. Jenny’s not quite at that level, but she’s up there. I’m another few levels down from her, but pretty good for a 外國人 - Wai4 Guo2 Ren2 - Outside Country Person — Foreigner.

That reminds me of this one time at a Chinese restaurant I ordered some Sichuan dish and the waitress asked me “How would you like that? Spicy? Mild?” I said “Spicy.” She said “Are you sure? We make it really spicy.” I said “Yeah, I’m sure.” She said “Maybe I’ll just bring you mild.” I said “No, spicy please.” She still didn’t seem to believe me. I said that I’ve had a lot of spicy food before, and I know what I’m doing, so please, spicy. She kind of looked at me funny, but finally said “OK, spicy.” The food came, and I ate it… it wasn’t spicy at all! Huh? They call this spicy? Later the waitress came back and asked how it was. I told her the food was good, but was hardly spicy. She said “I told the cook to make it mild. I didn’t think you cold take it.”

單 - Dan1 - Big, Single, Only, Sheet

單身漢 - Dan1 Shen1 Han4 - Single Body Man - Bachelor

A nice, relaxing hike + Northern Kicks, Southern Fist + Networked Mario Kart Double Dash!! + An original Amiga 1080 monitor (with “Cool Friends of Newtek” sticker) that against all odds STILL WORKS + Blazing Lazers + Invincible Obsessed Fighter + Keith Courage in Alpha Zones + Emulated disk drive “gronking” in WinUAE + Super Monkey Ball + Sword of Sodan + Yie Ar Kung Fu + Plenty of caffeinated drinks + Military Madness + Iron Fingers of Death + A visit to NAMCO (they rebuilt it) + Clik Clax + Twin Cobra + Mario Golf + Mexican Pizza and Teriyaki Beef from Taco Chinese Express (because where else can you get that other than Taco Chinese Express?) + Shadow of the Beast + Chop ‘n Drop (aka IK+) + Street Fighter I and II + “This is Amiga Speaking” + Obliterator + Chinese Super Ninjas + Barbarian + Legendary Axe + Doodling in Deluxe Paint IV (and creating new, original Homer vs. Kidd anims) + Plenty of Oreos + Lemmings + Secret Rivals + Pyros + Marble Madness + Rastan + The way things get really really funny late at night + Samurai Showdown + Rygar = Super Retro High School Flashback Bachelor Party!

備 - Bei4 - Prepare, Equip

準備 - Zhun3 Bei4 — Accurate Prepare — Preparation….

唱 - Chang4 - Sing

唱歌 - Chang4 Ge1 - Sing Song — Sing

Toto gets Karaoke Revolution and everybody sings (I scored a Platinum on “Like A Virgin”) EXCEPT Jenny? What sort of hellish alternate universe is this where sworn enemies of Karaoke sing, but Jenny, whose dream it is to have a Karaoke ROOM, refuses?

卡拉ＯＫ - Ka3 La1 O K - Karaoke

The etymology of 卡拉ＯＫ is really cool. The Japanese word カラオケ - Karaoke came first, where “kara” means empty and “oke” is short for Orchestra. But when this word was then borrowed by Chinese, there was no easy way to write down the sound “oke” so it was transliterated as OK instead. The final word is a totally confused mish mash of Chinese, Japanese and English words. Cool.

I am a mad syndication ninja!

Now that’s what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

飛 - Fei1 - Fly

Tim Bray took a couple of incredible pictures from a 飛機 - Fei1 Ji1 - Flying Machine — Airplane on the way to San Francisco.

錯 - Cuo4 - Wrong, Mistaken, Mistake, Error

I’m not sure if in Chinese computer bugs are ever called 虫 - Chong2 - Bugs literally, or if they’re just known as 錯誤 - Cuo4 Wu4 - Errors, as this English/Chinese IT Glossary says.

Come and get it!

New: Various bugfixes, MagpieRSS 0.61, one click mark all as read, Safari speedup, and for you feedaholics: the much-requested ability to flag all the items above the current one. If you’re faced with hundreds of items, and start reading them from the top down but then need to do something else, you can click one link to flag the current item and all the items above it, and then mark them all as read. You can come back and read the rest later!

Safest upgrade: extract to new, empty directory and copy your config.php over. Also should work: extract right on top of old version, then restore settings in config.php. No database tables have been changed.

This is not the fabled multi-user, category enabled, refactored, CSS/XHTML nirvana release. That one is still a ways off. I think a better way to get there will be a set of smaller, more limited releases, rather than trying to do it all at once. So here you go, and more coming soon!

鋯 - Gao4 - Zirconium

Oh yeah? Well why shouldn’t Zirconium be the word of the day?!?!?