This 403 error is usually caused by having AllowOverride set to All.

You can either fix this by Chmod’ding all your files to 644 (not very elegant) or paste the following into your apache conf file, replacing your “AllowOverride all” rule:

AllowOverride none
Order deny,allow
Allow from none

Just a quick tip, but hope this can save you some time!

The answer, It was the boys over in Redmond, WA. Quite the debacle ( Fail Whale ) for Microsoft.

After installation of the following updates:

• Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB974318)
• Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool – December 2009 (KB890830)
• Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973904)
• Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB971737)
• Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973917)
• Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB974392)
• Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Server 2003 (KB976325)

We noticed multiple occurrences  the following warnings in the System event viewer:

A process serving application pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ‘3524′. The process exit code was ‘0xffffffff’.

These warnings were immediately followed by a lovely error:

Application pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

With these messages at hand it became apparent that one of the Windows Security Updates was to blame. Looking into the specifics of each of the updates I had conluded that the suspect was “Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973917)“.

While I am still working to identify possible solutions for affected servers independently, removing Update 973917 has restored service temporarily for a number of my clients.

Anyone else see the Humor in this?

Take a lesson from this; Windows Automatic Update is kind of like a friend who secretly wants to cause you problems, because its fun….

Updated on December, 9 2009 at 1:59pm

The official response… get this; Microsoft wants us to reinstall Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 on the affected installations to bring all IIS6.0 components up to date. Seems like a Cop out to me. Sure it would fix the issue but this is going to cause a lot of man hours for a number of companies.

I have noticed that this method seems a bit unstable (you get the odd crash/blue screen) but at least its working!

Although its not available through the default yum libraries you can save yourself a huge amount of time by using the FFmpeg install available through the DAG repository.

First you will need to add DAG to your YUM repo by adding the latest RPM Forge release if you do not already have it on your system, I like to use the RHEL RPM:

rpm -Uhv http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Now all you will need to do to get FFmpeg running is one line through shell:

yum install ffmpeg

To test your install type:

ffmpeg --help

If you need to access the binary from a script, it should be located in /usr/bin/ffmpeg by default.

Anyone ever tried to publish a web app to production only to forget about the .htaccess?

Open a Terminal windows and type to show hidden files:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Open a Terminal windows and type to hide hidden files:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

What do these lines do? The first will update the Finder setting that controls the view option for hidden files. The second line will force finder to restart so the setting can take effect. Do note however if you have any finder windows open; they will close!

Source: Logic + Emotion

Nielsen Netratings estimates that Google was used for 60.2% or more than 4.8 billion of 8.0 billion searches started by U.S. users during the month of July. Comcast came up with a 61.9% share for Google and 7.3 billion searches of a total of a total of 11.8 billion. Both Yahoo and Microsoft keep losing ground: Nielsen puts the two companies at 17.4% and 11.9%, Comscore at 20.5% and 8.9%. Google’s market share gains appear to have accelerated in 2008, with much stronger growth than in previous years. According to Nielsen Netratings, Google had a market share of 46.2% in July 2005, 49.2% in July 2006 and 53.3% in July 2007. Over the past year, Google was able to increase its market share by almost seven percentage points – more than in any other 12-month period before.

Source: TG Daily

Aurora presents a number of very interesting visual approches; however, it also — to me, highlights the current state of data overload that users experience with today’s web. Although this browser interface and its control mechanisms are fairly effective ways to navigate through massive amounts of data it almost seems to highlight a much larger problem.

Is our appetite for data on the web out growing the “Browser”?

I eagerly await the future installments of the Aurora videos. Especially Part 4, which would look to be a touch interface to the browser.

Keep in mind this is a colaborative effort. If any of this type of work interests you I would urge you to meet Mozilla Labs’ call for participation and weigh in on the conversation.

What? Do you mean you haven’t?

Well its been done and it really is not all that horrible! Its actually surprisingly refreshing and an extremely well done production. Cheers to the team that made this happen, I cant wait to see more!

Check it out courtesy of Hulu:

Read more on the project over at: http://www.drhorrible.com/