Well... I came to the end of Friday exhausted, and with a long list of Work to do, on three different fronts. And those are just the urgent ones.
What with household stuff, family stuff, and being rather under the weather the past few days, I just haven't accomplished much over the weekend.
Kinda hard to focus, and over-use of caffeine to try to keep going doesn't help any.
I've made some progress on one of the work projects. Possibly even the most important one at the moment.
I did find a distraction, as if I needed another one: addressing the issue of poorly-formed bottom layers on the FlashForge 3D printer.
Turns out, though FlashForge doesn't officially have any firmware updates, installing the latest Sailfish firmware (and using the corresponding version of ReplicatorG) does... well, it doesn't improve the quality that much, but the printer finishes jobs a bunch faster, even at the same nominal speed settings. Then some fiddling with the Skeinforge settings, and... it's not exactly there yet, but I'm seeing some definite improvements in quality, while still having improved build times.
Also, I got a roll of ABS filament from a high-rated vendor, though it's looking like the roll of ABS that came with the machine is probably fine, and the firmware and settings will do the trick. Hey, having another roll of filament around in a second color won't hurt.
And I built the current version of Slic3r, which seems to work (unlike, apparently, the version bundled with the released ReplicatorG 0.40), as long as everything's set correctly... like the offsets being 0, 0 instead of half-full-scale.
Update: And, the next step in the project whereon I have made some progress? Involves enabling forwarding of some HTTP requests from the live(-ish) server to the test server, before I go replacing the entire content of the live server with untested material. It's simple, and the code worked fine when that-which-is-now live was inhabiting my home server. Just involves uncommenting the call to http_post_data. Simple, right? Er. Gotta install pecl_http, which requires installing a couple other things first.
But, everything having been installed, and Apache gracefully restarted? I still get Call to undefined function http_post_data(). And, if I check for that function being defined, and then call phpinfo()? Why, I find that it's not defined, and yet:
http
HTTP Support | enabled |
Extension Version |
2.0.6 |
Used Library | Compiled | Linked |
libz |
1.2.7 |
1.2.7 |
libcurl |
7.26.0 |
7.26.0 |
libevent |
2.0.19-stable |
2.0.19-stable |
Directive | Local Value | Master Value |
http.etag.mode |
crc32b |
crc32b |
So it's installed, and enabled, and yet the function I want to use is not there.
The extension is version 2.0.4 on my server, where it worked before. Surely the handy functions haven't been eliminated in a minor revision!
I think I should have spent the weekend sleeping, and not promised to have anything done by Monday.
Wunnerful: I look at the documentation for pecl_http, and there's nothing at all about the handy utility routines, which however are still described in the PHP manual as coming from that package. I'd seen something about an API change, so I backed off to version 2.0.4 (no visible change) and then to 1.7.6 (the format of the phpinfo section for http changed, but it's still showing as enabled, and the function I want still isn't there. The documentation does say there's a new namespace in version 2, but 1.7.6, as noted, doesn't work either, and anyway the documentation is entirely object-oriented, and (from the package side) has nothing whatsoever about convenience functions of any sort.
In the time I've wasted trying to get a stupid function call to work, I could have rewritten my script using some other (but less convenient, assuming both are working) library. Or a raw TCP connection, maybe. Perhaps I should rewrite that one function, using cURL or something, just to have it handy and avoid subsequent mucking about with cURL.
Friday the 13th come on a Friday this month; maybe the bad luck is hanging around all weekend. Now I'm trying to remember whether Fred (the mostly-black cat) crossed my path on Friday morning. (I'm pretty sure he didn't; I seem to recall encountering only the Dread Guardian of the Forest.)
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