Steve Jobs has been living with rumors for close to a year now that he is dying. It’s undeniable that he’s been losing weight. Some people have tried to say that his health is a private matter, while others argue if his health is deteriorating, he owes it to Apple stock holder to come clean. Well, he finally caved to pressure ahead of MacWorld and released a statement disclosing exactly what’s going on. Now perhaps those people will go out and get a life.

At first I figured the Apache update modified a configuration file somewhere, but a quick check of all the relevant directories showed nothing had been modified since August. Hmm. Next, I tried polling the server using Steve Gibson’s wonderful ID Serve utility to see what it thought it was running. It turns out that Apache was fine, but it didn’t have any PHP extensions turned on. A quick check showed that everything was in place for PHP, but it just wasn’t loading.

OK. Drastic measures. I ended up uninstalling everything related to PHP5, then reinstalling it to reestablish all the proper connections. I have no idea what could have hosed my installation, since this Debian machine has been very reliable, but all is well again. Now, off to install WordPress 2.7 and see what else I can break.

Now the Republicans are trying to downplay the implied association and are instead claiming that Obama lied when confronted with the accusation. Reading the above article and its treatment of the facts, we see that Obama really was telling the truth regarding his connection with Ayers, and, again, the Republicans are caught with their pants down.

I just wish every voter would read this type of treatise, since far too many "Joe Six-packs" are going to vote based on the 2-second sound bites the MSM is feeding them, courtesy of the Republican spin machine. Just look at that stupid woman who claimed directly to McCain that Obama is an Arab, or the guy in Florida who yelled out "kill him" (referring to Obama) in response to Palin’s hate-filled speech. It’s a shame that negative campaigning is so effective. It’s just not possible to run a winning campaign these days based on facts and issues, though Obama is doing his best to do so.

This is one scathing commentary. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann takes on the latest Republican mud slinging by pointing out numerous truths about Sarah Palin’s own past associations and her complete lack of credentials to be a vice presidential candidate. I don’t know who’s running the Republican campaign, but it seems to be one public relations screw up after another. If McCain/Palin end up winning, it’s going to absolutely reek of voter fraud (the same way it did when GW won a second term). The segment is a little long, but listen to the end. It’s well worth it.

I’ve been following the progress of SpaceX for several years now, and I’m looking forward to even more excitement in the coming years. Check out more details here and video highlights of the launch here.

I am bummed, though, that I didn’t get to see it on their live web feed. I knew the launch was going to happen this week, but they didn’t send an e-mail out until after it happened. They did blog about it, but I don’t check blogs often on the weekends. I couldn’t have watched it anyway, though, since we were at a Peter, Paul & Mary concert in Hartford, their first in a year and a half.

Fortunately, I had also recently cleaned up my system logging, and there were some helpful messages in the log. I did a quick Google search on the error, and in short order came up with this page. Someone else had this same problem over a year ago and was kind enough to write up a complete wiki page with step-by-step instructions for how he fixed it. Within minutes, Squid was back up and running. This Internet thingy is pretty cool!