September 2009 Archives

To all of those who follow the development news on Tweetie, the twitter application for Mac and iPhone, you will know that it is scheduled for a new release of the iPhone and Mac version. According to @tweetie on twitter, the version for iPhone was submitted for review yesterday. I am hoping for many new features on the iPhone version, including Push notification and landscape keyboarding. I don't know if push would be enabled, but that would be cool. Also, it would be cool if it allowed for Vide, Image, and GPS location posting all within the same app. Currently, the only way to do this is with a combination of TweetDeck and 12seconds.tv. this works well, but is a hassle.

For the Mac version, I hope for the ability to run the app in the background and not much else. I love the app right now, and really wouldn't change much.

Once these come out, I'll review them. Until then, you'll all just have to wait.

Tweetie,Product Reviews

Quoted from http://www.jameslockman.com/jamesblog/2009/09/fix-for-perl-gd-imagemagick-an.html:

Fix for Perl, GD, ImageMagick and more on MacOSX Tiger Server - James Lockman's Blog

A week of frustration followed my attempt at upgrading my XServe G5 Dual Processor from Tiger Server to Leopard Server. Silly me, I made the bold assumption that Apple would have the decency to leave the underlying server parts untouched and add their secret sauce for blogs, ical, collaboration, and the like, on top of what was proven. What do I mean by proven, you ask?

How about perl, or PHP, or MySQL? I used to have a perfectly acceptable Movable Type blog (this one, in fact) running happy as a clam on this server. I had never been able to get ImageMagick to properly install, though, as well as some convenience modules like Compress, but hey, Leopard was going to make everything all better. However, when we (props to my son Arthur, whose patience and tenacity led to success) "upgraded," nothing worked anymore. The web is full of complaints about various pieces of this puzzle, so I will leave it up to you to go digging. As for my blog and other data-driven and dynamic graphics-based sites that used to reside on this server, they were defunct. Dead. Doornail dead.
GD is important, as is DBI, DBI::MySql, ImageMagick, PerlMagick, and others. Without them, the Blog just doesn't go. Of course, the major technologies like MySQL and PHP are essential, but the versions provided by Apple were either just plain broken, or were inadequate for the tasks at hand. Of course, we reinstalled!
MySQL and PHP installers are available and we installed them according to the clear instructions provided by MySQL.com and Marc Liyanage, respectively. The tricky part was getting the built-in PHP to shut off and the new one to turn on, but judicious application of the "refresh view" button on the server manager cured that.

Then we turned to MacPortsto install the additional modules. What a disaster.Not MacPorts, mind you, it performed admirably. None of the ports we installed appeared in the list of installed perl modules, despite getting successful reports from MacPorts. I admit that after a few days of banging my head against the wall, I had had enough.Giving up, we scrapped Leopard Server and went back to Tiger Server. But, we were still without some modules.

It turns out that Apple's installation location for the remaining items is not where the rest of the world expects them to be. In the case of perl, when we check our version with CPAN, it reports that we have the current version of perl, and that our modules are installed. We were successfully able to install modules, and they all appear to install without issue, except for PerlMagick, which reports a whole pile of errors. More on that later. When we run the mt-check.cgi from the Movable Type installation, however, we get paths to multiple perl installs, none of which are the current version. Clearly, there is some major confusion here.

The solution turns out to be easy: ditch Apple's mangled perl distribution and put in a link to the good, current installation in its place. The following two lines in the terminal move the old perl installation to a safe place where it can do no harm, and then create the appropriate symbolic link to the /opt/local/bin/perl folder, where we have all of our modules installed.

sudo mv /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl.orig

sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl

Voila! All of my modules are now installed and available to MovableType. GD, DBI, DBI::MySQL, Compress, and all of the others we were lacking, except for PerlMagick.

Even though we used Ports successfully to install ImageMagick, PerlMagic fails, and it fails because of Apple's path problem. So, to install, download the tarball, then follow the instructions. Here's the key, though.
Remember the /opt/... directory? In the makefile.pl file, locate the LIBS and INC entries and change "usr/" to "opt/" in all of the path references in those two lines. Then, build as normal. Double voila!

Now, everything works as we expect it to. I can upload images and get thumbnails, I can connect to databases from my web sites and blog, and I believe that I can detect the aroma of rose coming from the exhaust fans of the XServe right about now.

MovableType,Perl,GD,ImageMagick,DBI::MySQL

As you all know, I run my blog on the Movable Type blogging platform. Until recently, the only applications that could connect to this blog were Ecto, which I didn't want to pay for, and Qumana, which doesn't look that good. The only other oprion was Contribute CS4, ahich I already had a license for. Up until now, Contribute has never connected to my Movable Type blog. It always errored out and wouldn't connect.

Until now.

I have no idea what I have done to make it work, but it does. So, I'll show you how.

When you open Contribute for the first time, it gives you the option to add a blog connection. Click on that link. You should get a window that looks like this:

In this window, you want to select the option to hook to "Other Blog Servers". In the field in the bottom, enter the address of your blog.

In the next pane, enter the username that you use to login to your site. PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STEP! Go into your Movable Type Administration panel, and go toyr user settings. Scroll down, and retrieve your Web Services password. This is the password that you enter into the password field in this panel. For the access point, you have to enter the path on your server to the file mt-xmlrpc.cgi. This file is usually located in the same folder as your MT installation. for example: http://www.yoursite.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi.

Once these steps are done, click finish. It will take a few minutes to build all of the required templates in order to build you a blog entry. NOTE: It will pull templates for all of the blogs that you have set up under your user account. This is handy for installations with more than one blog.

You are now ready to use Contribute CS4 to edit your Movable Type Blog. Have fun Blogging!

Contribute CS4,Adobe,Tutorials,Movable Type

On October 23 in 2001, apple rolled out the first of the iPods. These powerful machines held a massive 5 Gigabytes, Count 'em! 5 Whopping Gigabytes! they ran on a massive hard drive, and had a short battery life. But hey! they played over 1000 songs! And, best of all, it kept them all organized with this nifty little application called iTunes!

Okay, I'll admit it, the first generation iPods were pretty lame. However, they did have several things that most other music players had. They had a hard drive, for one. This was huge, considering that it was probably the highest capacity hard drive of it's size at the time. It also did have a media managing app that did all of the managing for you. No other player had the sync capabilities that the iPod did (correct me if I'm wrong). it also had a spinning wheel for selections through menus, which I know that no-one else had. However, it did have one minor glitch. The hard drive seemed to give out on mine right after the warranty expired. Apple would be happy to fix it for a fine $200. I did not fix it, and so as forever doomed to experience the famous iPod "Hard drive click of Death!".

As far as technology goes, this platform is still supported. Apple is still selling refurbished ones on the Apple store, and it will still sync witht he current version of iTunes. However, I would much rather have a new nano or iPod touch. Wouldn't you?

All for now!

Let me start by saying this to everyone who reads my blog.

If you use Movable Type, DO NOT UPGRADE TO LEOPARD SERVER!!!

The reason that I haven't blogged for the past month is due to the fact that Leopard server has more bugs than the first release of Windows Vista. It is missing almost all of the MySQL headers that allow Perl to talk to it. You have to go and download all of the MySQL header files from Apple website. That is a pain.

Once you have all of those installed, you'd think that the DBD::mysql modules required to hook perl up to MySQL would install correctly. Well, they wouldn't. Neither would DBI or any other of the data connection modules for Perl. So, after fighting with this for weeks (this is not an exaggeration. It actually took us weeks to get this to finally be useless) we decided to downgrade back to Tiger server.

After running a few basic commands, our server was back up running again in Tiger. Later on this week, I'll post a detailed instruction on how to get MovableType working on Tiger server with no hitches.

Again, if you know what's good for you, stay away from Leopard Server. Later on this year, we hope to have a working instance of Leopard server. We have another G5 tower, and will attempt to get leopard server working on that. Until we can figure out how to get it working, we'll be staying with Tiger.

All for now!

Well, after upgrading to Snow Leopard, I was excited about all of the new features that apple has promised for QuickTime X. Well, if you haven't upgraded yet, don't get too excited about QuickTime. In Snow Leopard, it cannot play several different video codecs that QuickTime player 7 can. I'm glad that the migration assistant did copy my QuickTime 7 Pro application. In fact, apple does have a QuickTime player 7 download for Snow Leopard, which is good for video people, like me.

Seriously, don't get excited.

All for now!