There’s just something about the new fonts that just doesn’t work for me after spending hundreds of thousands of hours either in a text editor or at the command prompt. Of course the actual Terminal Font on windows isn’t a TTF so that’s a dead end.

What I eventually found was a True Type Font called Video Terminal Screen. This is what it looks like in iTerm on Leopard at 16pt. Text and code look great with it, well to me.

• Japanese Verb Conjugation Chart (PDF) (XHTML) (Scribd)
• て(te) Form Conjugation Chart (PDF) (XHTML) (Scribd)

These are a works progress and if you see any mistakes, please contact me. The main chart should contain most conjugations used in modern japanese and I plan to add more useful compound verbs in the future, as I learn them. I’ve collapsed some rows so the chart would fit on one page, these are indicated by the numeric references in the ‘Pre’ column.

The XHTML charts may not display properly, if at all (Internet Explorer) on Windows, and the PDF versions are formatted for printing on A4 paper.

The charts were compiled with information from the following great resources:

• Collin McCulley’s Japanese Verbs Page
• An Introduction to Japanese Syntax, Grammar and Language (PDF)
• Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC Japanese Dictionary
• and many others

Although it seems improbable I have seen a case where this could be attributed to achieving a mysteriously unstable Apache or PHP state. This particular server happened to be mis-configured to load APC as a shared object even though it was already compiled into PHP statically. I recently tried to reproduce this but failed when running a recent build of APC. I do know, however, that removing the erroneous apc.so solved the problem.

We, at Facebook, recently encountered a similar issue resulting in the same outcome. It was the middle of August when I got a message from a user wondering why we were showing him ‘codes’ instead of search results when he was searching for a friend. He was able to reach me because my email address is in the first 10 lines of the source code for s.php. This source code was visible to him rather than the search results he was looking for so I dropped everything to try and figure out why.

This shouldn’t have been possible running the Apache modifications we have in place. We had already patched Apache to detect requested PHP extensions that return a non-handled response, preventing source code from being returned. Although similar results can be achieved using an Apache module such as mod_security, this module only supports output filtering in Apache 2. We decided to patch Apache 1.3 directly which has the added benefit of averting a potential configuration error. This patch for Apache 1.3.37/1.3.39 is now available here.

After looking at every possible angle, I was unable to configure our Apache build to serve source code even if we wanted to. What we eventually found was a single server running a standard distribution build of Apache in our production pool of several thousand web severs. A lot has been posted online blaming PHP for this, however, the server that we eventually found was not running PHP. In order to criticize PHP we should scrutinize the implementation details of the language itself and eschew the attributes that are common among all web server programming languages.

These sorts of issues can and do happen to anyone, large or small, so what can you do to minimize the damage when this situation arises? As I mentioned earlier, you can use a module like mod_security and it’s response parsing features, however this does not come free of cost. You’ll need to be running Apache 2.x and if you are concerned with PHP performance this is not a good choice today, see Ilia Alshanetsky’s article Apache 1 vs Apache 2 Performance. If you’re already running Apache 1.x you can take a look at our patch but you can also do more, like abstract all PHP pages by implementing an include which evaluates code outside of the document root:

/siteroot/docroot/index.php:
include_once '/siteroot/site/index.php'; // point to the real index.php
?>

Although not absolutely preventing source code leaks, this method, proposed in the blog New Web Order, is sound advice and minimizes risk when an exposure occurs. In an optimized APC environment, where apc.stat=0, this added abstraction should come at little to no cost in performance.

Simple problems such as this can affect anyone large or small and as the complexity of an environment increases it requires more robust auditing and monitoring. Open source monitoring toolkits largely lack the necessary features to scale in support of these environments so it is essential that we continue to build and improve these systems internally to prevent and detect problems like this. If you are interested in building these types of systems with us or working on PHP with us, feel free to contact me or checkout Facebook Jobs.

If I recall, I had rated this at about a Wendnesday’s difficulty but I’m not entirely positive. If you take the time to do this then I apologize in advance for the two page pdf format. This is the only format I currently have available.

Also, it’s not too late to see Will Shortz speak at UC Berkely this may. Tickets are still available here.

With the recent release of Konami’s Arcade Stlye Controller for Guitar Freaks I decided I had to order one so I could play one of my favorite games again. Not having even a playstation makes this an expensive game to import. Between the cost of the game, controller, console and mods we’re looking at over $500. Of course I could have gone with an alternate game like Guitar Hero, but Konami is the originator of the rythm game genre and GF reflects this in being much more playable than Guitar Hero.

So with the gear in hand I plugged everything in, ready to tear the game up. I started playing some of the songs I knew in Masterpiece Silver and was failing almost everything. For songs I know I could score an S on in the arcade I was getting a D or an E now! I set to searching online for the issue and found out that because my tv is an LCD based HDTV the upcoversion this can lag the display enough to make a rhythm game like this unplayable. For most games this means you’ve got to shell out about $500 for a specialized upconverter but luckily the newer Guitar Freaks games come with a timing delay setting. With my tv a setting of -4 saved the day!