mahiwaga

I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday trying to figure out tweaking the setup of Apache on my iBook. After countless hours of fscking with .htaccess and mod_rewrite (and combing the URL rewriting guide), I figured out how to get Apache to load up Blosxom without requiring “blosxom.cgi” to be in the URL. (For example, instead of this entry being at http://blog.fatoprofugus.net/blosxom.cgi/2003/Aug/16/virtual-hosting, you can see that the location box reads http://blog.fatoprofugus.net/2003/Aug/16/virtual-hosting.) I realize that there is a FAQ on how to hide the CGI bit on the Blosxom website, but it wasn’t enough for me for some reason that I can’t recall at present.

I think it involved me trying to get the rewrite rules to be different depending on whether the file was on my iBook or whether it was on my webhost. This proved futile, so instead, I tried to set up virtual hosts on my iBook.

Having to muck around httpd.conf again struck fear in my soul. Luckily, setting up local virtual hosts on MacOS X has been covered on macosxhints, leading me to this nifty little script that futzes with Netinfo to get virtual hosts to work for you. (Aargh. Registries. Whatever happened to plain text files? I am having Windows flashbacks. shiver)

But to the heart of the matter—how I was able to get rid of blosxom.cgi from the URL (or is URI? I am so confused. Remind me never to read stuff about web terminology ever again.):

1. Rename blosxom.cgi to index.cgi. DO NOT play with $url if you intend to do development on your own computer and then just mirror the contents to your webhost. Otherwise, you can set $url to point to your webhost.

2. You need a webhost that supports .htaccess files. (Meaning that your webserver is configured this way. For Apache, this means mucking around httpd.conf and changing the AllowOverides lines to the appropriate value. Being lazy, I just set them to All. There is surely a safer setting. On MacOSX at least, you also have to play with the user config file in /etc/httpd/users, named username.conf. Or you can just skip all this mess—I couldn’t get it to work—and install webmin on your computer. Yes, it may be serious overkill, but it made my life a lot easier.) Create it in your DocumentRoot, and put the following lines in:

  
RewriteEngine on  
RewriteBase /  
RewriteRule ^$ index.cgi   
RewriteRule !^index.cgi - [C]  
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s  
RewriteRule (.*)$ index.cgi/$1  
XBitHack on  
IndexOptions  
DirectoryIndex index.cgi  
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks Includes IncludesNOEXEC Indexes MultiViews SymLinksIfOwnerMatch  
ContentDigest off  
ServerSignature On  

Note that some of this stuff is from `webmin` and I don't understand all of it. You definitely need the `Rewrite` rules, and the `DirectoryIndex index.cgi` line, and at least `Options ExecCGI`. I don't know about the other stuff.
    
You may have to mess around with `RewriteBase`. Check out the [mod_rewrite][2] page to figure out what it does. I don't know enough to explain it correctly, so you might as well check the authoratative source.

1. Now upload all your files to your host if they’re not already there, and you should be good to go.

Every so often after restarting my iBook (which I rarely do, because I usually just let it sleep) Keychain will ask me if I will allow it to use password in my keychain for Mail.app and for Fire. This entry at the Mac OS X Livejournal community answers my question.

Frighteningly, I think I was the most level headed person last night. Wandering rampant through the streets of Chicago at 5 a.m., intermittently yelling at cars and people at the top of our lungs, trying to hitchhike home because none of the cabs would stop for us, I had a serious fear of one of my companions accidentally trying to hail a cop car.

I only became familiar with the concept of the drunken phone call this year, most notably ever since i’ve become increasingly reliant on my cell phone. While my erstwhile companions went buck-wild, I did have enough presence of mind to call two of my oldest friends. Neither of them picked-up, thankfully.

One of my buddies apparently called his ex repeatedly though (the relationship being an epic saga that I will not recount now, in which I got ridiculously entangled.) So his ex, who is thousands of miles away, calls me this morning, complaining (because of my ridiculous entanglement, she and I have become good friends) Anyway, the only thing I wanted to mention was that he apparently accidentally called her so that his phone was on while I was declaiming about how I have lost faith in God, because he allows pederasts to pose as priests, and that the Roman Catholic Church has been laid bare as a corrupt institution, which is pretty much just out to cover its ass. Even Pope John Paul II is suspect, in my book. And then they have the hypocrisy to talk about how “unnatural” it is to be in a homosexual relationship.

I then went off into a long tirade at an all-night-diner about how I wanted to become a Buddhist, because I think Buddhism is the only religion that no one has every tried to kill anyone else in the name of religion’s sake (although, human nature being what it is, I could be wrong.)

My brain is on fire. I have lost my train of thought.

And now, we are supposed to go out again tonight. Hopefully this spinning sensation will stop before then. Hah.

I’m going to blog this just so I have it on my local machine in case disaster once again strikes. (Can you tell I’m an optimist?)

In Chicago, the primary DNS is 206.141.192.60 and the secondary DNS is 206.141.196.13

Other DNS servers can be found in the dslreports ameritech FAQ.

I found pretty good instructions from this blosxom Yahoo! Groups message by Jason Hoffman.

Now if only I can figure out how to generate both the .html and .writeback flavors from the same template.