I had my second appointment with my endocrinologist today, and it went really well. He was happy with my numbers and where I’m at, but he taught me something new which has me more motivated to lock things down a bit more.

A few months in, now, I’m not taking any insulin most days. I am apparently still definitely a type 1, not really LADA, but even then a special case. My numbers have been where they need to be, but I’ve certainly been more resistant to using my insulin pen than I should. My homework, then, is to settle down a bit with the pushups and do a bit better with the needles. I’m also going to be working on my technique a bit, since I manage to draw blood more often than not. XP this diabetes, I will.

Drew got out there before me, writing about the support he gets from his partner. I was nodding my head a lot while reading that post, because I really cannot imagine going through any part of the past few months without Allison. She jumped right in, too, and has been there with me at every step of the way, reading everything in sight and watching out for me in every way possible. Even now as I have a better handle on everything I still feel safer and more relaxed with her around.

I’m going to violate the rules a bit again and mention a second great thing, which also wouldn’t have been possible without Allison’s support: exercise. I’ve generally been an active person, though it was never a very consistent thing; I’d have months where I’d walk more, and then others where I’d be mostly sitting on the couch. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of yoga, stretching, walking, and general exercise; all with her support and encouragement. Even though exercise is more often a “type 2″ topic, it honestly is just as important for everyone, type 1, 2, and non-diabetics alike.

Your Xbox might detect that you’re in the mood for fighting games, and change its splash screen accordingly. Eventually, computer interfaces might completely remold themselves to your mental state.

via “Brainput” Boosts Your Brain Power By Offloading Multitasking To a Computer – Slashdot. The future is near..

Today’s assignment is to “Find a Friend,” to highlight a personal blog about diabetes. My recommendation is to Dex and the City, one of the first diabetic blog I found after meeting the author at a local diabetic gathering. She has some great posts, and she led me to find a whole lot of other diabetics on Twitter.

Twitter

I understand this post is supposed to be singular; a friend, rather than friends. Even so, I’d like to point out that Twitter is an unbelievably cool resource for diabetics. There are a number of hashtags out there. Some I like to check are:

• #bgnow — posts about a current blood glucose level
• #doc — diabetic online community

Also on Twitter there’s #DSMA Chat Wednesdays at 9pm EST. There are a lot of people who participate and it’s a great place to find other diabetics.

#reddit-diabetes

I’m not on reddit all that often, but it does have a wonderful diabetic community at /r/diabetes. There’s a fair amount of traffic on the site, and the IRC channel is generally well populated.

mod_fcgid

The first step in the journey was to replace mod_php with mod_fcgid. In the default CentOS installation this is not available, but via EPEL it’s an easy yum install mod_fcgid away.

Next, you want to make sure that mod_fcgid is running PHP instead of mod_php. You can blank out the entire file, though simply commenting out the AddHandler line in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf is enough. Now, add in your configuration for mod_fcgid:

# run PHP via FCGI
AddHandler fcgid-script .php
FcgidWrapper /usr/bin/php-cgi .php
FcgidMaxRequestsPerProcess 499
FcgidMaxRequestLen 536870912

# important! make sure this matches DocumentRoot/your PHP directories
<Directory /var/www/html>
  Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>

I just put this in my /etc/httpd/conf.d/fcgid.conf, though in theory you could make a separate file for it in that directory. It is going to be important that you have the +ExecCGI line for wherever you run PHP, else you’ll only get a 403 for each PHP request.

The official docs tell you to write a wrapper script for the FcgidWrapper variable, though I’m comfortable with the defaults. You likely do want to set the FcgidMaxRequestsPerProcess, however, to a value less than or equal to the max number of requests that the sub-process will serve. The default is 500, ergo I went with 499.

Beware RewriteRule w/ .php/.. !

One sneaky problem I found was that in switching to mod_fcgid, all my RewriteRule‘s caused some major problems. Namely, I had written them such that they included the pattern RewriteRule ^(.*)$ controller.php/$1. For whatever reason, PHP_SELF wasn’t being set properly and it caused all sorts of havoc. Switching to instead be RewriteRule ^(.*)$ controller.php?$1 (just a ? in place of the /) made everything come back to normal. That was a tricky one to sort out.

Switching to event MPM

All of the above will work just fine under the prefork MPM, so it’s worth doing those parts first. Rather than the event MPM, you can also now just move to the worker MPM, which is admittedly more common and older/more tested than event MPM. Still, even though it’s not well documented, the event MPM is included in the stock CentOS installation, and switching over is easy as editing one line in the /etc/sysconfig/httpd:

HTTPD=/usr/sbin/httpd.event

That is seriously all you need to do. Restart the httpd service, and you’ll be good to go. I’ve been running nginx for some projects, but with the above setup I’m seeing rather good performance and much lower system requirements than with the default Apache setup.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or if you’re stuck at a certain point, please leave a comment!