dpk’s weblog

I tried to buy some wood at Lowes last night, and my Chase Visa card was declined — a first. There’s definitely room on the card, but I didn’t have time to deal with it then. I called them about it today, and they told me their computers were down for an update, and they couldn’t even look up anyone’s account information. I asked them if that would have caused the decline last night, and the CSR said yep. I was asked to call back tomorrow at 8am Eastern, because their systems would be back up then.

Did I pick the most rinky-dink credit card company out there or something? One that can just go entirely offline for over 24 hours? I hope I was merely misinformed. At least I have a backup card for the trip next week.

Update: Yep. They were down. The charge wasn’t declined, apparently. It was merely marked “call center” or something similar, telling the merchant to call in to verify the charge. For me it was basically the same thing, because they were closing and having to call in a charge at a store I’ve shopped at for over a year is just silly. Anyway. They tell me they’re back up now. Still seems like a long and expensive outage, though.

The pdf extension library shipped with PHP-4.4.7 doesn’t work, and it’s a known “non-bug”. I’m not sure why they still ship the broken library. I installed the PECL version, via pear (my first time trying that), and that was pretty painless. It created a pdf.so and put it in some long /usr/local/lib path. So I figured, now I can just load it with:

dl("/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20020429/pdf.so");

right? Wrong:

Warning: dl(): Unable to load dynamic library './/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20020429/pdf.so' - Cannot open ".//usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20020429/pdf.so" in /root/test.php on line 7

I have “./” as my extension_dir in php.ini. For some reason, the code for dl doesn’t recognize that I’m specifying a full path, though. The fix, according to posters on http://www.php.net/dl, is to prepend a sufficient number of ../’s to the path before calling dl() !

The resulting code (with helpful dpk-comments) is:
<?php
// This is required, and is astounding.
$dotdots = preg_replace ('//([^/]+)/', '../', dirname(__FILE__));
$dlpath = $dotdots . '/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20020429/pdf.so';
dl($dlpath);
// My brain still hurts.
$p = PDF_new();
?>


Keith Olbermann: Bush & Cheney: Resign already.