Bugfix: Drupal's Acquia Marina Theme

I like Drupal. It's generally easy to configure and add new content. I've been looking for a nice theme, since I'm not much of a theme designer, and Acquia Marina fit the bill.

I've installed it on my two toy websites, Dragon Affairs Test Site and Dragon Affairs Family and Friends. While I was playing around with it, every now and them I'd run into the dreaded White Screen of Death. The only data recorded by Apache was "child pid 2363 exit signal Illegal instruction (4)". It was quite annoying.

After spending a lot of time disabling and re-enabling various modules (with no luck), I started playing with the performance optimizations. When I disabled the "Optimize CSS files" option everything worked normally. Bingo! Something was up with the CSS files.

Well, they looked normal, except when viewed on a UNIX-like system. I run my sites on an old FreeBSD server. The vi editor showed that the lines in each file ended in CRLF instead of the standard LF character. A quick edit (using tr -d '\r' style.css, and repeating that for each *.css file) and I was back in business. Odd how the littlest of things can cause a complete failure.

QT Build Issue Solved

Stack Overflow is a very useful resource - there were three answers, of which both Rohan McGovern and Ken Rogers provided the correct solution. Many thanks to them both.

I should have known that I either needed to build QT from source with MSVC flags set, get a commercial license for QT and download the MSVC build, OR use mingw32-make. For the time being, I'll use mingw32-make and save rebuilding QT for another day.

Still Frustrated with the testqstring Example

The Trolltech labs forum isn't the right place to post a question about QT Creator. I continued to search for an answer as to why moc.exe wasn't generating a moc file for the testqstring example. I didn't find any answers at either qtforum.org nor Stack Overflow.com, so I reposted the question at Stack Overflow. We'll see what happens.

Playing with QT Creator

I want to branch out from C systems programming and try some GUI programming. Nokia's QT Creator looks like an excellent development environment and QT (originally from Trolltech) has been around a long time. It seems to be a safe place to start.

I tried a couple of examples from the tutorials and they worked just fine. I also want to exercise some test driven development skills. Well, what do you know - QT has QTestLib for writing and supporting the development of unit tests. That sounds like just the ticket.

Unfortunately, my out-of-the-box experience isn't what I hoped for. QT has a meta-object compiler which parses the C++ source code and generates a .moc file. I was trying to compile the testqstring tutorial example, but for some reason moc.exe wasn't generating any output. I could see from the command line that moc.exe was being called, but no output was generated, so the compile phase failed.

I'm not sure how to resolve this (what should be an incredibly simple thing to do), so I posted a question on the QT Labs general discussion forum. We'll see what happens.