solution

I just ran into the craziest problem where I couldn't get any third-party apps on my iPad to open. I'd tap them, there'd be a quick blink, then nothing, I was back to the home screen with all my app icons.

Summary: A solution for "pear/pecl is using a unsupported protocal (protocol)".

While trying to install the APC Opcode Cache on a server yesterday, when I tried to run this command:

pecl install apc

I kept getting this error message:

pecl.php.net is using a unsupported protocal - 
This should never happen.
install failed

After doing some research, it looks like you can also get a similar error message with PEAR:

Waiting iPad apps: If you run into a problem with "waiting" iPad apps during the iPad app installation or update process, my "waiting iPhone apps solutions" article should be helpful. Because all these Apple devices use the same iOS operating system, and because we've found four possible solutions to the "waiting iPhone/iPod apps" problem, these waiting app tips should work just as well for waiting iPad apps (also referred to as "stuck" iPad apps).

Two MySQL error messages

Earlier this week I ran into a problem with a website that I tracked down to a MySQL error message that looked like this:

can't create/write to file /var/lib/mysql/foo.bar.baz
Errcode: 23

(The actual file referenced in that error message doesn't matter, as it will be different on most systems, but the "can't create/write to file" is important.) After digging through my log files even more, I also found this error message related to MySQL:

Problem

I was just trying to install PHP from source code on a CentOS Linux box, specifically trying to configure PHP with GD support with a configure command like this:

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs \
            --with-mysql \
            --with-gd

Unfortunately this configure command fails, ending with the following two lines of error output: