wiredfool

A few from Halloween…

Sometimes, the family photos look a little like a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

…more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

And now the real job begins.

Recently we shifted the core of the webapp at work to run on lighttpd/php5 connected by fcgi from the standard apache1.3/mod_php4. There have been a couple of cases where people using the POST api methods have consistently gotten a connection closed error with lighttpd version where everything worked properly on apache.

This is the post:

POST /api.php HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: text/xml
Host: www.example.com:443
Content-Length: 19742
Expect: 100-continue
Connection: Keep-Alive
X-Forwarded-For: 10.0.0.0

<TransactionRequest>
...

and this is the response from lighttpd:

HTTP/1.1 417 Expectation Failed
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:35:29 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.13

and the response from Apache:

HTTP/1.1 100 Continue

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:37:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.34
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.4-8+etch6
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
...

To make matters worse, it appears that pound, our front end load balancer, doesn’t log the error, but it does show up in the lighttpd logs as expected.

So, what’s the problem? It’s the expect header. Lighttpd doesn’t support it, and sends back a 417 Expectation failed error if that header is included. It’s a known WontFix bug for the 1.4 series, and the 1.5 series has been expected for a long while now.

The thing is, there are a lot of command line http clients or libraries out there that send this header, and it’s distressing that lighttpd simply can’t work with them.

And then, what’s the fix?

I’m afraid that it’s goign to be to route around lighttpd for now, either by replacing with apache2 or ngnix. There’s an outside possibility that I’ll be able to filter the header on the load balancer, but that’s not looking likely right now.

It starts with an R
RRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
It ends with an R
RRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Sorry. It’s talk like a pirate day.

Apologies to Jason.

The former Publisher of the National Review endorses Obama.

But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

That’s an indication of just how far the ‘conservatives’ have gotten from their past.

Bloomberg reports that a money market fund has broken the buck due to the Lehman mess.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but one of my trailing indicators for how bad the mortgage/wall st./financial industry crapfest was if money market funds start breaking the buck. This is not one of those indicators that’s useful for further action, it’s one where if we pass this point, we really just need to hold on and ride it out. And it’s just happened to one fund which was holding 785 million of Lehman Brothers notes. Presumably, since they were leveraged out 20 or 30 or 40 times, there’s another bunch of billions of Lehman Brothers commercial paper out there.

I’d now like to request that I get 5 points back which where deducted from my engineering economics final back in college (1994 maybe?). There was a question where my answer was marked incorrect because I asserted that there were risks involved in investing in money market funds. I had noted that they were small, but that they existed, and the professor disagreed.