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I'm back at work after a week off. The UPS control panel continues to work (!), but there is no word back from the manufacturer (says the contractor who installed the thing and filed the ticket). I find this troubling; either the manufacturer really hasn't got back to us yet (bad), or I should have insisted on being a contact for the ticket. I'll have tos ort this out tomorrow.

Spent much of my day tearing my hair out over mod_proxy_html. Turns out that, by default, it strips the DTD from the HTML it proxies; this is a problem for one app that we're proxying. Not only that, the DTDs it does support are HTML, XHTML, and either with a "Transitional"/Legacy flag — but no URI to a DTD, like the one pointing to the Loose DTD that our app uses and the damned thing threw to the floor. (Sorry, brain cells on strike today and my ability to write clearly is going downhill.)

You can specify your own DTD, including a URI (undocumented feature, whee!), and thus put back in the original — but it doesn't append a newline, there's no way to append a newline that I could figure out, and so it mushes the DTD together with the first html opening tag and makes baby Firefox cry and render the page badly.

My rule of thumb for a long time was that if I start lppooking at source code, I'm in over my head. I'm starting to think that may not be entirely true anymore, that I've advanced to the point where I can read C (say) and generally understand what's going on. But when I start looking for API documentation for Apache 2.2 (surprisingly hard to find) to find out if, say, ap_fputs or apr_pstrdup chomp newlines or something (near as I can tell, they don't), or just what AP_INIT_TAKE12 takes as arguments…well, then I am in over my head. If nothing else, I don't want to make some silly error because I don't know what the hell I'm doing. (That's not a slam against the Debian folks; I just mean that I felt shivers when I read about that, because I dread making the same sort of highly-visible, catastrophic error) (unlike the rest of the planet, you understand).