I can’t even count the number of times over the last 9+ years that I would have been thrilled to have symbolic links (symlinks) in Windows. After all these years it looks like I might finally get my wish, the Windows Vista/Longhorn NTFS filesystem is supposed to include symlinks. Beyond that the new SMB2 network filesystem protocol is supposed to include support for this.

This is another situation where even though Microsoft is doing the right thing here by adding a feature that their system needs to have, many folks will be laughing and making fun of them for it. Why? Well, the FreeBSD symlink(2) manpage claims that it first appeared in 4.2BSD, in 1983. It is rather hard to save face while explaining that it would be more than 20 years later before Microsoft would get around to including this feature in their filesystem.

This makes you really reconsider the wisdom of the saying “better late than never”.

Bank of America has a new feature/service called Keep The Change. The idea is that every time that you use your Visa debit card it will automatically round the transaction up to the nearest dollar and deposit the difference in your savings account. I thought this was interesting not so much for getting people to save, but as possible donation method. Imagine being able configure this Keep The Change feature so that the change is directly deposited to The Red Cross, your kids school or any number of good and worthy causes.

Perhaps Gus Gorman was on to something after all.

With the sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL came the inevitable break down of the dollar value per link to a blog based on the money AOL spent. Using Technorati to determine the links to a site you knew that it was only a matter of time before someone put them all together so that you can just enter your URL and calculate how much your blog is worth.

I’d have a hard time believing that there is anyone who would be willing to pay the $19,194.36 my blog is calculated to be worth today.

If you aren’t using the Apache module then using pcntl_fork() to fork a PHP process works fine. There are times when it would be really handy to perform a fork in PHP when it is running as an Apache module. There is a way to fake this, sort of.

Instead of forking your PHP script you can exec() another process to run in the background. This obviously isn’t the same as forking, but it is about as close as you can get when running as an Apache module. While reading through the comments on the PHP exec() page I was able to piece together enough information to make execing a background process work. Here’s an example:

exec("/usr/local/bin/myprog 2>/dev/null >&- /dev/null &");


This will execute /usr/local/bin/myprog and redirect STDOUT and STDERR to /dev/null and run the process in the background. You can even pass arguments to your program like this:

$safe_arg["arg_1"] = escapeshellarg($arg_1);
$safe_arg["arg_2"] = escapeshellarg($arg_2);
exec("/usr/local/bin/myprog {$safe_arg["arg_1"]} {$safe_arg["arg_2"]} 2>/dev/null >&- /dev/null &");


Make sure that you escape any data you get from outside your script when using it in exec().

OpenOffice 2.0 is out today. I’ve installed it on Windows XP to do some basic comparisons to Microsoft Office 2003. One of the things I’m most excited about is the new Base program, basically a Microsoft Access clone. It is unfortunate that doesn’t natively support PostgreSQL, but it does support MySQL natively. So I’m playing with Base connecting to a PostgreSQL database via ODBC.

I’m hoping that Base is cross platform, it would be nice to have an easy to design front end tool for databases that could be used on Windows, Un*x and Mac OS X. This is assuming the native port gets done, running OO in X under Mac isn’t so great.

With any luck the new abilities of OpenOffice 2.0 will win over a few more converts at work.