Fuckin Unisys
I just love my VersaCounter. That’s the hit counter I use on my website. I’ve been having a bit of difficulty getting it to work on the new server. Four hours of banging on it last night didn’t convince it to give up it’s secrets.
But there is a good side… I asked the nice people at Spenix (my new ISP) for shell access to my account and it was granted in just a few hours. I SSHed into my account to run the VersaCounter Perl script and I had the problem resolved in 15 minutes. :-)
As I had guessed (this was just one of my many guesses last night) Spenix has the latest versions of all the Perl modules. This means that the latest GD module -doesn’t- support .gif images. Remember how Unisys sat up after 10 years of giving the .gif file format away for free? Now Unisys wants money for their patented property… Jerks…. Indian Givers… whatever… Well, the free-source community responded by cutting .gif out of the loop. The .png file format works just as well as .gif and uses a different code base. So, all I had to do in my situation was to rename all .gif references to .png, convert the images from .gif to .png and I was good to go! Unfortunately, I made a syntax error when converting but I caught that in a second by running it from the shell (fixing that error without a shell would have been nigh impossible).
Hurray! Maybe I don’t hate computers after all.
PS. See my 12-6-03 entry for the sourcecode :-)