Frustration abounds today as my attempts to be useful and productive get hampered by annoyances. My PHP code keeps falling over because the virtual host I'm working on can't keep an include path for more than a few minutes. A trivial fix would be to call ini_set at the top of the main page but I am bothered by this because I prefer working things to workarounds. So I am wasting time investigating the matter.

Although there is a bug in the PHP database which describes my problem perfectly that bug has been fixed and marked closed for a couple of years now. Because of the similarities my focus has been on the PHP side of things, however this bug seems to be part of a wider collection which has come and gone over the past year or so. Now when the problem crossed minor versions I didn't worry, but it goes back far enough that it crosses a major version too.

My current thinking is that it's an Apache problem. Or more accurately, a problem with the PHP interface to Apache. This could potentially be an OS specific issue but that too has changed major versions during the various manifestations of this issue. The only item which has been limited to minor version updates has been Apache. So now in my frustrations I find myself pondering jumping up to 2.2 there; probably not smart given that it's not different enough to be likely to fix my problem but just different enough to likely cause more. It sounds like a wonderfully stupid idea.

Taking a break from PHP I turned to some Javascript work, only to discover that for some bizarre reason every time I call getElementById it returns null instead of anything I can actually use. This has the marvellous side-effect of making everything I write completely unusable and therefore I'm unable to test it.

I'm thinking with my current success rate I should avoid doing anything more complex than sleeping for fear of whatever it is breaking beyond understandability.