Well, seems that at some point between PHP 4.4 and PHP 5, something about my libgd, libpng or zlib broke, because now I’m getting all these
PHP Fatal error: imagepng() [<a href='function.imagepng'>function.imagepng</a>]: gd-png: fatal libpng error: zlib error in ...
errors popping up. I know it worked a while ago. Not sure why it’s not working now though.
Great, something else to dig into. One of these days I’m just going to have to break down and redo the whole server.
Alive and kicking again
After a day of running the Dell Diagnostics, only one bad block on the 160GB drive and a flaked out Zip drive were found. Fortunately, the Maxtor utilities were able to scan and repair the error without any loss of data (that I’ve discovered yet). The Zip drive seems to be pretty much dead and won’t read anymore Zip disks, so I guess that might as well come out.
Now, what to put in the empty bay…
Trusty computer, don’t fail me now!
The computer at home decided not to boot up properly anymore. Gets to the Windows boot screen, then does a BSOD, and reboots itself. So after doing this a few times, I booted up the Dell diagnostics and started running those. At least two tests on one of the drives failed, saying ‘a possible failure is predicted by the device’s SMART status’. Not sure which drive it is yet, but with my luck it’s probably the one with all the important stuff on it and no recent backup done either (I was getting around to doing one, really I was). Go figure.
Hopefully I can figure out a way to recover from this enough so I can at least copy some of the more important stuff to another drive.
I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.
Update: 10 hours later it’s still doing the read test on my 160GB drive. 1 bad block found so far, which hopefully will be recoverable. Hopefully I won’t have to reformat it or anything. That’ll mean losing a lot of non-critical stuff like captured videos, photos and all our ripped CDs. Inconvenient, but not fatal. If this is the only problem found, then I’ll have gotten off lucky. I have a feeling there will be more though.
Trying to learn about PHP frameworks
A recent discussion on PHP frameworks on the PHP mailing list got me thinking about how I could use them to rewrite some of my DB projects. I looked into a few of the frameworks brought up in the discussion, and they look interesting. The frameworks I picked up on were the MVC (model-view-controller) types, which reminded me of the event-based OO programming style of Objective-C on NeXTStep.
They also made me realize that I’d really be pushing my meager programming skills to the edge trying to figure out how these things work and how to use them. It’s also going to take me a good bit of time to learn them too, which is something that always seems to be in short supply these days.
Well, add one more thing to my ever growing list of things to learn 🙂
Couple of useful articles I stumbled upon over at ONLamp.com that might help me get started.
Understanding MVC in PHP
Implementing MVC in PHP: The Controller
Implementing MVC in PHP: The View
Implementing MVC in PHP: The Model
A list of different PHP frameworks: MVC Frameworks Written in PHP
WASP looks interesting.
Oil cooled PCs
Why not, works for x-ray tubes and transformers. The guys at THG fill a case with cooking oil and dunk a motherboard in it to test out the insulating and heat dissipation powers of oil.
Haven’t finished reading all of it yet, but I assume it worked for them since they’re writing about it.