Salocin

In Belgium, I live in the country, and by virtue of a momentary lapse of reason and a glass of wine with dinner at sunset, I found myself volunteering to "mow the lawn" in one of the fields adjoining a neighbour. The weeds had grown quite tall, I was told, so I said I'd take care of it tomorrow. After all, how tall can a weed be?

Two metres, that's how tall a weed can be. And a good inch wide at the base of the stem. But I didn't know that yet, I'm getting ahead of myself.

After mentioning my plans to a suitably equipped individual, and describing the field the edge of which I had decided to clear, this fully tooled up fellow said he knew the area I was talking about and had exactly what I needed. He proceeded to give me a helmet, a harness and a two-stroke Kawasaki handheld brushcutter.

What's a brushcutter? It's a vicious machine with a spinning blade (tamer versions have spinning plastic wire, this one had a serrated blade) at the end of a long metal shaft, with a little engine. The whole thing is slung on a harness whta you wear, because while it's quite carryable, it's too heavy to hold in the right position while you mow.

I found out, upon arriving at the field itself, why I would need this kind of equipment. The weeds, brambles and nettles were two metres high or more, and so thick that when I cut them near the ground, they stayed held up by the other brambles and nettles around them. The powerful and vicious device I had been given was barely up to the task, and as I cut things down, a cloud of aggravated insects would ascend into the air around me.

The field is now clear of weeds, and I feel an extreme sense of accomplishment that I know is completely unwarranted, but that I haven't felt since I last went rowing several months ago, and that I therefore intend to enjoy!

I moved from one server to another recently, and for some reason my Movable type stopped working (hence the lack of articles for some time). When I finally found the time to do a little research, I figured it out, and so am posting here what happened to me so that you can fix it if it's happened to you.

The error was : FORBIDDEN : You don't have permission to access xyz.cgi on this server, or something of the kind.

I thought it was an access permissions thing, so I opened a shell to the server and sest all the permissions to 777 to check it, but nothing worked - so I changed them all back, and started browsing the web under the assumption that it was something to do with the CGI files not executing rather than the access permissions per se.

I finally looked in the apache error log and found that ExecCGI had not been activated in this directory. So armed with this knowledge, returned to various search engines and found the answer I was looking for here.

What you need to do is edit (or create) the .htaccess file in the directory with the CGIs in it, and add the line Options ExecCGI. This will solve the problem. It's really quite simple once you know, but when you don't know, it can be quite frustrating.

It was only going to be a matter of time before someone tried to break it - Kevin Rose managed to max out his 1000Mb of space on GMail. All people could think of to discuss afterwards was the difference between 1000Mb and 1Gb and whether GMail had made a mistake. Sad.