If you’re having problems installing the Perl Crypt::SSLeay v0.5.1 module on Ubuntu, you might take a look at one workaround until a better fix comes a long.
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Well it seems, despite the megabucks budget, Limerick Corporation have failed to deliver a basic mapping application to service their planning application systems. If they’d paid an Limerick IT (or LRTC to us old skool boyz) student a hundred quid to integrate the Google Maps API, they’d have better served their target audience. However, once again, the “if it costs more, it must be better” principle prevailed. The broken system seems to be powered by Proteus, who belong in the last decade, judging by their website, or, at best, not in the web services sector.

What’s wrong with it? Well for starters, it’s IE-only, and not alone that, but it relies on a custom ActiveX control. Early 90s technology for a public service body? I appreciate that Web 2.0 is a bit of a marketing fad, but there are some “ways and means” of doing things on the web which are well established practices, and ActiveX is not one of them. It’s not rocket science, but no doubt Proteus proclaimed it was, for a fee.

I spent a little too much time today trying to figure out why a simple line wouldn’t work in a file upload PERL script, based on the common CGI module.

The line in question was..

my( $fUploadedFileHandle ) = $query->upload( 'file' );

.. and I was generating a line in the web server logs ..

CGI::upload: syntax error at cgindex.cgi line 1539

Some time later, after trying to pawn it off on someone else, I finally checked out the CGI.pm bugs page, and sure enough the latest version, v3.21, has a simple typo bug in it. Until a new revision is released, running the supplied patch works just dandy.

It’s rather amusing the increase of spam I get to the feedback script on URL.ie. I’ve only pimped the site on boards.ie, and in my personal email sig (not lists). Also, I don’t use any formail (or clone), so I assume that the boards.ie link has bumped up the sites ranking/popularity. Still though, serving 2,000+ URLs doesn’t make it all that popular! I certainly didn’t think anyone would bother to Google the feedback page, or scrape the site, for the purposes of spamming. I certainly thought it’d be down on the list of priority for any scripts out there.
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If you, like me, use a combination of Tortoise SVN and SVN on Cygwin, you might have noticed, like me, that they don’t dance too well.

The problem seems to be down to TSVNCache.exe locking files (sometimes in SVN folders, sometimes not). Mostly, my problems were when I performed an SVN operation from cygwin, it’d give me errors about files being locked or no longer being there, and suggesting to run svn cleanup, which only resulted in the same, varying, errors.

The solution? Kill TSVNCache.exe from your process list, go to where you installed Tortoise SVN (e.g. c:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN), and in the bin folder, you’ll find the executable. Rename it. Problem solved. I lose the SVN status icons on my folders in Explorer, but I never used them anyway. For me the loss of those is definitely worth the less grief I have no in using both environments. Of course there might well be other caching functions, but I haven’t noticed any degraded performance, just the status icons missing. YMMV.