RewriteBase takes one argument

Staying in Denver, CO, away from my family, and far from the development databases at work I decided I had time to work on a pet project of mine.

Knowing there will be a few hours on airports and in the plane on my way home I decided to get the project running correctly on my laptop before I continued work.

Then I ran into this:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, you@example.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Log file:

[Sun Jan 09 14:16:56 2011] [alert] [client ::1] /Users/Sites/web/.htaccess: RewriteBase takes one argument, the base URL of the per-directory context

After browsing through the first two pages of google results withouth finding anything useful I suddenly realized maybe the config files doesn't accept comments at the end of the lines. Turns out to be true. See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/configuring.html#syntax