I've been working on some stuff for my website in my spare time, and every once in a while the damn website craps out (on my test machine).  On one of those occassions where I cared enough to figure out why--versus refreshing the page over & over until it finally works again--I find this stupid message in the web server logs:

Canary mismatch on efree()

Seriously.  That is the worst f#@!ing error I've every seen.  And probably the most annoying.

This now being the third occassion, I Googled for an answer.  It was a "patch" for PHP to make it "more secure".   If nobody can use it, then it's more secure by default, right?  You know... make a car so secure nobody can get in, even the owner?  Throw some barbed wire round it, hook it up to 1.21 giggawatts of power, install the facemelter 3000 in case they get past that, and a healthy amount of C-4 under the seat just in case?  THAT'S SECURE!

I read an article that showed me how to fix it.  Probably the most insightful part of the article (paraphrased): "... it was written to handle bad code, but I concentrate on writing good code..."  Exactly.   There are so many poorly-written PHP applications out there now that PHP has to protect the server from the programmers!

"What the hell is explosivo," you ask?  It's a nickname for a fighter in Fight Night 2004 that I occassionally play on my original Xbox.