Jay and I flew out to Spokane, Washington and then took an hour drive south to Pullman for a quick day trip to visit Pullman Regional Hospital for an upcoming project. We left on a small jet and arrived on a small propeller craft. We got out of town just as a snow storm came rolling through.

The holiday season was much busier than I was expecting and it looks like the new year is off to a busy start. I’ve posted a few pictures of the trip below.

A few weeks back my old primary system suffered some serious boot issues and was out for an entire day. After a lot of time wasted trying to save things with knoppix, etc, I finally went out and bought a new system.

I’ve grown used to developing on windows so things have been a little slow, but I’m gradually adjusting to using a mac. I’ve already moved my dev server and my subversion server to this machine so I’ve brought the old system home for triage. Eventually, it will allow me work from home whenever I need to, and it allows us to play games again.

Two of our other systems are now up for sale on craigslist/ebay.

So far though, I’m doing just fine and am enjoying the new system. It’s much cleaner, more intuitive, etc.

While I was at zendcon I needed to setup my macbook with a typical apache/php/mysql server, but I was unsatisfied with both the default server that apple included and with the install system provided by XAMPP. I’ve since setup a server on both my MacBook and my iMac.

In order to get support for mysql as well as tools necessary for compiling, you need to install the apple developer tools. Check your original mac disc as you may already have a copy.

Anyway, on with our install:

Apache

First, download the latest version of the apache httpd web server.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache --enable-module=so --enable-module=rewrite

Then, run the standard make, sudo make install.

MySQL

Then download the latest mysql source file. Make sure you download the source “Compressed GNU TAR archive (tar.gz)” as we’ll need to custom compile it.

However, PHP5 no longer includes mysql shared libraries needed during the configure process. To get these, download the source file for the mysql version you just installed. Once downloaded, decompress it and run the following:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-unix-socket-path=/usr/local/mysql/run/mysql_socket --with-mysqld-user=mysql --with-comment --with-debug

make

sudo make install

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_install_db --force

sudo mkdir /usr/local/mysql/run
sudo mkdir /usr/local/mysql/data

sudo chgrp -R mysql /usr/local/mysql

sudo chown -R mysql /usr/local/mysql/run /usr/local/mysql/var /usr/local/mysql/data

Then start the server with:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql &

zlib

Then, install zlib if it’s not already installed on your system. Download zlib, and it should be a basic ./configure, make, sudo make install process.

Once zlib is installed, make sure you know the path as we’ll need it during the php configure process.

PHP

Next, download the latest php package. Decompress it, and now we’re ready to configure.

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache --enable-cli --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-zlib-dir=/usr/local --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs

Then, run make and sudo make install to complete the process.

Restart apache and test everything out. If php didn’t do it automatically, add in AddType application/x-httpd-php .php to your httpd.conf file - commonly located in /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf.

Then, start your webserver.

sudo /usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start

And finally, once everything is done you’ll want to setup your account to properly allow access to mysql and apache commands. Just run the following to add their paths to your bash profile:

echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/apache/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

I recently started work on a firefox extension, but this time I’m working on a mac rather than a pc. Below is a sample shell script for automatically building the JAR and XPI files.:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir build
mkdir build/chrome
cd chrome
zip -r formsaver.jar .
cd ..
cp chrome/formsaver.jar build/chrome/formsaver.jar
rm chrome/formsaver.jar
cp -R defaults build/
cp install.rdf build/install.rdf
cd build
zip -r formsaver.xpi .
mv formsaver.xpi ../formsaver.xpi
cd ..
rm -rf build
echo -n extension build successful

Here is a sample file for automatically building on windows (batch script):

Note: This requires that you have 7zip installed.

set x=%cd%
md build\chrome
md build\defaults\preferences
cd chrome
"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "%x%.jar" * -r -mx=0
move "%x%.jar" ..\build\chrome
cd ..
copy defaults\preferences\formsaver.js build\defaults\preferences
copy install.* build
cd build
"C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a -tzip "%x%.xpi" * -r -mx=9
move "%x%.xpi" ..\
cd ..
rd build /s/q


I recently moved my development server from a linux box to my primary machine, an iMac. I wanted to move my subversion repository while maintaining the file histories for everything inside. Worrying that it was going to be a huge issue, I was happy to discover it was completely simple:

On the existing repository machine, run:

svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > repository-name.dmp

Transfer your dump file to the new machine and then, create a repository. Once subversion is running and you have your repository created, import the dump file:

svnadmin load /path/to/repository-name< /path/to/repository-name.dmp

You’re done!