Aaron & Isaac

Lots and lots of December pictures

Just put an enormous amount of pictures in the December 2004 album. Check 'em out!

Also, I tracked down the comment bug, it's a problem with our web hosting company, who has assured us it's being worked on. Technical details after the jump.

The captcha (or security code image) isn't showing up, so you can't post comments. The image is rendered by a perl cgi using the GD module, presumably making a hash of the numeric value passed in. Trying to directly load the cgi in a browser gives you an internal server error:

line 55./usr/bin/perl: relocation error:
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1/i686-linux/auto/GD/GD.so:
undefined symbol: gdFontGetGiant

So apparently, our host made a change on their end (to GD, perl, or maybe even apache) that broke GD in some way. gdFontGetGiant is some kind of alias to an instance of the GD::Font class, used in this case to set the font size. Do a perldoc on GD if you want to learn more then you'll ever need to know about this powerful graphics library.

update (01/04/05): if you got here via google because you have the same problem, I'm afraid I can't be of much help. My hosting company fixed the problem, saying that all they needed to do was reinstall the latest version of the GD module (v2.17 currently). Hope this helps. If you figure out something else, please let me know and I'll update here for posterity.

update2 (01/06/05): Brian from fatdays.com points out:

For sites like mine that are running CPanel (http://www.cpanel.net/), the root user can solve the problem with GD by SSHing in and running /scripts/cleangd .

Thanks Brian!

Posted by joe at December 28, 2004 11:04 PM