Lasse Dittmer, born 2006-08-23 20:25, 3530g.

Without big thinking I set up a test domain for a php based cms containing an underscore (_) (www_example.your.domain). The web interface to the domain server accepted the domain name without a problem. Subsequently I tested the cms with Firefox, everything worked fine. Then I wanted to try everything with Internet Explorer (6.0, XP, SP2) and the merchandising system surprisingly did not work. Searching for the error it turned out that logins also did not work. So the session management was quickly blamed. Trying to narrow the error down even a simple

session_start();
print_r($_SESSION);
$_SESSION['x'] = 1;

did not work as expected. Then I vaguely remembered that IE did not like underscores in cookie names. So I tried www-example.your.domain and bingo.

Checking RFC1738 section 3.1 only a-z, 0-9 and - are allowed. So it's indeed a broken domain name. Strange that the dns system did pass it through though.

I own a Samsung X20 notebook with integrated i915 video adapter and a Dell 2405FPW monitor with 1920x1200 native resolution. Up until now it only worked with Windows (igck) at it's native resolution. Out of the box X.org from Debian etch (7.0.22) did not work and insisted to put the monitor at 1600x1200 or even lower resolutions, even after patching the modetable with the 915resolution hack. After googling and finding no really helpful info I finally asked Alan Hourihane, one of the authors of the intel video driver of X, for help. By using the current Intel video driver from X.org's git, branch modesetting, it now works. Yay to modular X that I did not have to compile the whole server. Step by step how to...

I'm trying to get the rfcomm thing going with my new Nokia E60, so that I can go online over it from my laptop via UMTS. With my Nokia 6230 it worked right out of the box. So I did some research but haven't found a solution yet. This story is just an anchor for some memorable links.

I've updated the storage engine of my cms to only make INSERTs and no UPDATEs on database level. Current objects are always retrieved by intelligent SELECTs. This has a number of convenient consequences, especially considering version tracking and history. Having lots of updates of course will bloat the database size. I'll have to find a solution for that. Also there will be problems with enabling/disabling stories and finding the correct version to display.