Archive for April, 2006

Blood sucking vermin, scum of the earth

Like I said recently, Bill Zeller, one of the original Zempt developers, let the zempt.com domain registration lapse (this was partly my fault, because Adam Kalsey had asked if I wanted to take it over before it lapsed — at the time, I didn’t.) The domain (which was registered with GoDaddy) became locked by the registrar. Adam told me later, after I had some time to devote to the project, that GoDaddy wanted $80 to get the domain out of registrar-lock. This seemed excessive to me, especially since this is an open-source project that no one is making money on, so I waited several days, checking the availability each day with a whois query.
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Function to replace PHP fopen() for URLs

Update Jan. 10: I’ve complete reworked this function and you can view the new version in my new post.

If you have old scripts that rely on using fopen() to open URLs, you might run into the same issue I have found with PHP 4.4.x. I have seen this same problem on three different servers (all running IIS) — XP Pro, Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003. If you try to open an URL using fopen(), your script will crash, and hard. Each php.ini had the allow_url_fopen set to “On”. If you are running PHP as ISAPI, it can require IIS to be restarted as well.
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Apostrophe in title causes IE script error in WordPress admin

If you go to your admin panel and click on Manage, you might notice that occasionally Internet Explorer throws a script error.
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Zempt — not dead yet

Update (2006-09-19): I have released a new version of Zempt. Read about it in my latest Zempt post.

One of the problems with open source (at least with small open source projects) is that it can take a long time to get updates and patches. Support is provided by just a few people, any web sites devoted to it are hosted and paid for out of love for the project. The people who run the project usually have families and real, paying jobs that preoccupy the bulk of their time. I believe this describes Zempt perfectly.
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