The other day, I was in the position where I had to recompile Vim (and GVim) on Ubuntu. I had installed the version from aptitude, which is perfectly good apart from the fact that it requires and installs the ruby 1.8.7 package. I actually use RVM for my ruby binary management, and I wanted to tell Vim to use the ruby 1.9.3 installed on my system via RVM.
Yesterday, I changed the host for my website. It was only slightly rocky, involving a couple of hours of down time, but all in all pretty good. And I'm very pleased to be free of my previous host, they who shall not be named. Let's just say that they're one of the biggest web hosts. I'm now with Mythic Beasts, who have been very friendly and helpful and offer great deals on all sorts of hosting - check them out.
As you may have noticed, some drastic reshuffling has occurred on the site. I've decided that it was futile to try to keep several totally different categories of blog running at the same time, so I've turned this blog into a purely technical one. Hopefully that will make it easier to navigate, and will be more useful to more people!
PHP as part of MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL and PHP) does not come with the process control extension enabled. There is a way of compiling PCNTL as an extension and linking it in to an existing PHP build, but it's a bit in-depth.