Andy Chase

I've been using PHP for so long that I haven't had much call to delve into the CGI-BIN directory in quite a while. Once I determined that my host has Python installed, I decided to see if I can run Python scripts from the CGI-BIN directory. It can be done, but right off the bat I ran into a problem whose cause wasn't immediately apparent.

I had a simple hello world script in the cgi-bin directory:
hello.py
#!/usr/bin/python
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n"
print "Hello, world!"


Path to the interpreter correct, check. Permissions set to executable, check. Nevertheless, Apache kept returning an HTTP 500 error, and writing "Premature end of script headers" to the log.

Shame on me for editing the file over ange-ftp from a Windows installation of Emacs; the script was getting saved with the vexing MS-DOS style rn newlines, which was causing the error. Once I figured that out and stripped those damn ^M characters from the file in Emacs literal mode, I remember having the same problem back when I was using PERL.

Emacs-specific Stuff

With a little more digging I finally found out how to do what I've always suspected was possible, that is to configure Emacs to always create files in 'UNIX' mode even when running on Windows. Add this to your .emacs file:

(setq default-buffer-file-coding-system 'undecided-unix)

And, to fix the newline characters in an existing file, you can use

set-buffer-file-coding-system

(Usually bound to C-x RET f.) Enter 'unix' at the prompt, and re-save the file.

(Many thanks to Stephen Leake for his post at http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/help-emacs-windows/2002-12/msg00053.html)

I went into town to check the mail yesterday, and because the dog is a much more social animal than I'll ever be I took him along. He likes to walk around in the center in hopes that somebody will stop and make a big fuss over him.

Being a good citizen, I took it upon myself to clean up after my dog after he pooped prominently on the sidewalk. There aren't any "public" trashcans that I know of in the center of town, so we walked behind a building containing a couple of businesses and some apartments. There's a dumpster there, which seemed like a better place for canine excrement than out in front of the building. In the six years we've had the dog, I've deposited many a poo-bag into dumpsters behind businesses and even other apartment buildings, without incident.

Well, yesterday I guess my luck ran out. There was a man standing near the dumpster, talking to somebody in an idling car. As I deposited the bag into the dumpster, the man by the car broke off his conversation and said loudly, "That's for tenants, you know."

I looked up in surprise, and before I could formulate a reply he continued, "I pay to have that stuff removed!"

Taken aback as I always am by the petty assholery of other humans, I was still at a loss for words.

In his best I-know-full-well-you're-not-a-tenant-but-I'm-cleverly-making-a-point voice he asked me, "Are you a tenant?"

At times like this, when I am utterly enraged by such stupid confrontations or spectacularly bad customer service, my brain simply shuts down; my ability to form intelligent arguments (or even ad hominem arguments) leaves me completely. I often wish it didn't, but perhaps it's for the best; it's probably my brain's way of telling me it's not worth the mental energy.

So, I merely mumbled some stupid apology. Having put me in my place, the guy gave me a big fake grin and said, "Just so you know. And I like your dog, so I'll let it go this time."

"Let it go?" What, like he's going to call the cops if I do it again? Or send me a bill for the cost of hauling a bag of poop? I understand his point; to paraphrase the argument used to tell kids why they shouldn't throw rocks into ponds, if everybody threw dog poop into the lake, there wouldn't be a lake anymore, would there? But it's not like he caught me heaving a 30 gallon Hefty bag full of feces into his dumpster. It's not even like I drive up to the center of down and use that dumpster every time I walk the dog.

The witty rejoinder I should have used occurred to me, as it always does, about 30 seconds later:

Next time, I'll leave the dog crap on your sidewalk.

He struck me as the sort who would have gotten really belligerent if I had argued with him at all. What gets me is the fact that the guy would have been just as snotty if he had caught me leaving the dog poop on the sidewalk; no doubt he would have made some witty comment about my own toilet habits. So, once again my brain was probably right: Not worth the effort.

As anyone looking for a PHP programming job in the current economy knows, those jobs are few and far between. That's a problem if that happens to be the only language you know.

There are plenty of people, CTOs and CIOs included, who are quick to dismiss PHP (PHP's not a "Real" language) because

• It's not PERL
• It's not ASP
• It's not JSP
• It's not ColdFusion
• It's very easy to learn; easy enough that there are a lot of self-styled "PHP Programmers" out there writing sloppy, insecure, and unmaintainable code because they've only gotten as far as learning mechanics.

I should know about that last one, because that was me when I first got into PHP; it's really easy to begin peppering HTML pages with an echo statement here and a for loop there, and then maybe you decide to try hooking up with a MySQL database so you just stick the password right in the same file, and before you know if you've got a big kludgey mess. It works, but it's just as much of a pain to maintain as a static HTML page.

Getting a handle on PHP's OOP features was probably the single biggest milestone for me. Apart from leading to much neater, better organized code it also familiarized me with the style and terminology that many "Real" Object-Oriented languages use, to the point where Java has finally begun to make sense to me.

I'm also learning Python, which is a damn elegant language but for which there's even less advertised demand than PHP. The thing I find most encouraging is that I'm finding the learning curve for both Java and Python significantly shorter than I did as recently as two years ago... When I first started with PHP I was most concerned with the hows of piecing a script together, but I think I've since made the leap to understanding the whys of organizing code in certain ways. The whys are ultimately more important, because it makes it a lot easier to apply concepts from one language to another. It's sort of like learning one Romance language and suddenly realizing that the others are very similar in a lot of ways.