unix – /thomasarie

Yesterday, Firefox 4 was launched and lots of people — including me — are happy now. I heard about Firefox 4 features during last year Pesta Blogger in Jakarta. At that time, Mozilla Indonesia brought some people from the team (including the developer) to share some knowledge what could be expected from Mozilla Firefox 4. I was impressed with some features, even some features were already shipped with browser like Google Chrome. It was like, “Okey, that’s cool. But, {name one of the browsers here} already has that (feature)”.
After that, I have Firefox 4 Beta releases installed on my MacBook Pro. I had two version of Firefox browsers installed so I could jump between them when I want to see some changes. Everything was running great, including the upgrade processes. I haven’t found any problems so far. When I joined the Firefox 4 Twitter Party, I was happy.

But, is everyone happy? No. Yahya Kurniawan, a friend from Jogjakarta, didn’t have his Firefox 4 run well. The issue was on the graphic drivers. Everything was fine — he had some browsers installed, anyway — until he had Firefox 4 installed. He’s still upset, I think. :)
Yes, Firefox confirmed that there are some bugs:

Firefox 4 automatically disables the hardware acceleration and WebGL features if the graphics driver on your system has bugs that cause Firefox to crash. You still get all the other benefits of Firefox 4, of course, just not the newest graphics features. But for best results, you need an up-to-date graphics driver that fixes those bugs.
Windows users with Intel cards: you need a very recent driver.
Windows users with NVIDIA cards: you need driver version 257.21 or newer.
Windows users with ATI cards: you need driver version 10.6 or newer.
Instructions are also given for Mac and X11 (Linux/Unix).

You can also find some additional details at Benoit Jacob’s blog. So, if you happen finding the problem after installing Firefox 4, you might want to check this issue.

When I had problem with WordPress installation, it was about WordPress Admin Area (Dashboard) Redirect Loop, I got the solution. Today, I experienced different problem. Still related to WordPress.
Okey, I’m not going to tell you that the problem only happens for WordPress. It might happen for other platforms or applications. Read on the details, you’ll know what I mean.
When I enter WordPress dashboard (admin area), I got 404 error page. It seems that the wp-admin folder does not exist. But, it’s there. I told Lala about this, and she reminds me that I’m not the one who got this problem. (see WordPress Support Forum thread for details).
So, I checked the error log. If you’re using cPanel for your hosting account, you should find the error log there. And, I got this:

[Tue Dec 30 09:20:18 2008] [error] [client ip.address.here] SoftException in Application.cpp:544: Directory "/home/username/public_html/somefolder" is writeable by group

Okey, it’s about SoftException in Application.cpp:544. I searched for answer using Google, and I found a useful answer.

As the message says, the specified foldername has been made writable by group.
That suggests that your server’s apache configuration doesn’t allow you to make folders writable by group.
ie: you’ve got the wrong permissions set on one or more folders.
Check with your hosting company to find out what permissions you’re allowed to set.

The answer is not related to WordPress issue, but it’s a solution for the same problem. So, I checked the wp-admin folder permission again. It was 777. Okey, I changed it into 755… and voila! Problem solved.
Okey, everything is working great now. It’s a new lesson for me :)