the echothis blog

The other day I got a rather important-looking email from Comcast saying they thought my PC had been infected with a bot. Now, being in the business, I am religious about keeping up to date on both Windows Update and my antivirus program (Norton Security is supplied by Comcast). So to be infected with a… Continue reading Comcast Customer Support Chat – pretty awful, even if it’s a bot

Since I’m always on the lookout for better music systems, I played with Google Music Beta a bit over the last week. Pros: The interface is pretty clean, but it’s a pain to make your own playlists (like it is with most jukeboxes). They have an “instant mix” button which makes a playlist based on… Continue reading Impressions of Google Music Beta

With Firefox 4 being just out, the Selenium team hasn’t had a chance to update their Add-on packaging for the release Firefox version (although I see it’s been tested on the beta version). So I manually hacked the RDF files for the v1.0.10 IDE and PHP formatter, to get up and running. You’ll need to… Continue reading Hack to get Selenium IDE running on Firefox 4

I ran across this today, when upgrading from CakePHP 1.2 to 1.3 on a CentOS box. Since the bug didn’t appear on Windows, after a bit of debugging I realized it was actually caused by a misconfiguration in the PCRE library that ships with RedHat and thus CentOS 5.x. It’s been reported to CakePHP but… Continue reading Fixing CakePHP 1.3’s Cache key error on Red Hat and CentOS

This took me an awfully long time to debug, but if you happen to be using both the CakePHP Facebook Plugin and FirePHP version 0.3.2 Server Library, you will get “redeclaration” errors if you try to include both FirePHP and the Facebook Connect component. This is because they both declare a FB() class. Eventually the… Continue reading FirePHP and CakePHP-Facebook-Plugin class collision