Yabfog

At some point today, the Washington Post broke its website for Blackberry users (and perhaps other mobile device users).

Now, any time I try to access an article by clicking on a link in my RSS aggregator on my Blackberry, I get redirected to some lame "mobile site," and I can't see the story I'm trying to read.

Shame on you, Washington Post!

UPDATE: Emails went unanswered, so I called them at 703.469.2500. Me: "Your website is broken to Blackberry users." WaPo (with a level of disinterest I thought only possible when talking to an accountant at a cocktail party): "It is?" We'll see what happens...

I have a server running CentOS 4.4 updated with the PHP 5.1.6 from the testing repository. When I tried to install Zend Optimizer 3.0.2, I ran into this problem:

Failed loading [path]/ZendOptimizer. so: [path]/ZendOptimizer. so: undefined symbol: match

Then, when I tried to downgrade and install Zend Optimizer 3.0.1, I ran into this problem:

Failed loading [path]/ZendExtensionManager.so: [path]/ZendExtensionManager.so: failed to map segment from shared object: Permission denied

I noticed some talk about SELinux being a possible culprit, but rather than disable SELinux, I decided to try and solve the problem.

This article about SELinux and ColdFusion MX in Red Hat Linux 4 had the information I needed to quickly solve the problem. Basically, I needed to change the security context of the Zend extension manager and optimizer files so that Zend runs in the same security domain as the web server (in my case, Apache).

Here's what I did (note, I installed Zend Optimizer in a non-standard location -- /usr/include/php/Zend rather than /usr/local/Zend):


chdir /usr/include/php/Zend/lib
chcon -R --reference=/usr/sbin/httpd *.so
service httpd restart


Et voila!

Dave Winer is looking for a developer to work on Share Your OPML.

If you're interested, I strongly urge you to pick up the baton. I can vouch for what Dave says in his post: he's demanding, but he really invests in the people with whom he works. As long as you're not a prima donna who cannot handle tough questions about your work, Dave has a lot to offer as a teacher and a boss. Actually, boss is a terrible word for the working relationship you can expect to have with Dave. He's an articulate collaborator with an insight into users' wants and needs that I find amazing.

Opportunity knocks. Answer the door.