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Apache 2.2 was released to a mixed fanfare. While everyone was pleased at the improvements most had to rest on their laurels while their web programming technology of choice was updated accordingly. At the time of writing, PHP 5.1 and 4.4 have an unofficial connector available (unless you want to run the unreleased 5.2 code), Ruby on Rails has several ways of working with it, and many others have received updates. Adobe’s ColdFusion MX 7 was given an update which provides compatibility, but the company decided against including (the older though still officially supported) 6.1, so officially users of 6.1, my current employer included, are up the proverbial creek without an equally proverbial paddle. Or so we thought.

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Everyone wants to say that their Ruby-on-Rails projects are using the best data structures on the latest RDBSs, sheer brilliance through and through. The simple fact of life, however, is that not every project is from-scratch, not every project can have a new whistle-clean schema designed for it, and not every datasource is a brand-spanking new install of PostgreSQL. For the times when you’re not working with the newest, you may feel a need for a new connector to your older database:

• ActiveRecord ODBC connector

AOL seem to have signed a deal with Kaspersky, who make probably the best virus scanning software for Windows, to offer their basic anti-virus software for free. The best part of this is that you don’t have to be an AOL customer to avail of the offer, so get thee hence:

• http://www.activevirusshield.com/antivirus/freeav/

The Apache web server, or more correctly Apache HTTP Server, is a wonderful program for serving web pages to the world. It can be a bit tricky to set up, however, especially if you want to run it on Windows as many of the configuration examples you’ll find online are for UNIX rather than Windows.

One particularly tricky thing to get working correctly is log rotation, where instead of saving all of your site traffic logs into one file it can split it up by day, month, etc. As mentioned, this is tricky because you would assume that the program you use to do this would work with the regular Windows directory names, e.g. “C:\inetpub\logs”, but it doesn’t.

So…. what you actually have to do is something like this:

ErrorLog "|D:/Apache2/bin/rotatelogs.exe D:/Logs/error_%Y%m%d.log 3600"

Note that I’m using the forward-slash (UNIX-style) directory separator instead of the backslash (Windows-style) directory separator. That seems to be the trick that got it to work for me.

On that note, there appears to be a bug in the rotatelogs.exe program on Windows. When you configure the rotation to use any time fields (hour, minutes, seconds) they are given “0″’s instead of the the real values, so you end up with e.g. error_20060912_184405.log instead of error_20060912_000000.log. I’ve not been able to find any official record of this, nor does the documentation have any mention, but as I’ve found other people experiencing this problem I’m going to assume that it is a bug and live with per-day log files.