* * * * *

If you’re like me and you’d tried to have your Leopard PHP-MYSQL build just work on Snow Leopard, I’m sure you met with the same rude awakening that I did.

It didn’t work.

If you followed my guide for installing LAMP on Leopard, you should start by cleaning out MacPorts and starting fresh.

To be certain, you should honestly clean out everything.  But before you do, be sure to list out all the ports you currently have installed.  Do that like this:

sudo port installed

And copy the list of installed ports to a text file. For reference.

Next let’s do some housecleaning (BE CAREFUL! DON’T UNINSTALL UNLESS YOU MEAN IT!):

sudo port clean --all vile
sudo port -f uninstall installed

Then you can go about re-installing your environment. The guide below is slightly modified to be able to work on Snow Leopard.  Enjoy!

* * * * *

I’ve found a relatively easy way to maintain a flexible, updatable development under MacOS 10.6 which goes so far as to install my own components, but not to have to compile them (which I’ve done several times and can attest, is a pain).

This setup gives you a great web development environment under Leopard (geared in my case towards Flash development compatible with the WordPress platform), which does a better job of playing by the rules than the default install of a lot of these elements.  And with MacPorts, the whole thing is modular and very easily maintained.

And everything on the list is free and/or open-source.

* Note that you’ll need to have administrator privileges on your user account to do this.

** Also note that this is geared towards creating a relatively unfettered development environment.  I don’t make any considerations about server security or server optimization for large-scale web applications.  This is really geared towards creating a simple, local dev environment.

Includes:

• XCode Tools
• MacPorts
• Apache2
• PHP 5
• MySQL 5

* optional installs:

• GIT/Subversion
• GitX/SCPlugin
• Sequel Pro (formerly CocoaMySQL)

derived from a bunch of sources, including:

php-5.2.5 on Leopard

Using Macport to Setup PHP5 and Apache2 on Leopard/

Installing MYSQL on Mac OS X Leopard Using Macports

Here goes:

1. Install XCode Tools:

http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html

pretty self-explanatory. Install them.  You’ll need them at the very least for MacPorts.  But they come in handy if you ever need to compile anything.

2. Install MacPorts

http://www.macports.org/install.php

MacPorts is a modular install system with easy update / swap / uninstall capacity.  It’s like Fink (I say, never having used Fink) — just an easy way to install a bunch of standard programs.

There are several install options, but the easiest thing to do is just use the disk image here:

http://distfiles.macports.org/MacPorts/MacPorts-1.9.2-10.6-SnowLeopard.dmg

Unless you’re an advanced user I recommend you do that.

3. Update MacPorts

sudo port -v selfupdate #makes sure ports is up to date
sudo port sync #syncs the local port index with the remote index

4. Install Apache 2

sudo port install apache2 +universal
sudo port load apache2 # set to autorun at boot

The standard web server. Standard, because it’s really stable, fast and flexible.

more info: http://blog.rajatpandit.com/2009/03/12/using-macport-to-setup-php5-apache2-on-leopard/

** notes **

You don’t necessarily need these, but I find it’s helpful to have some aliases to address apache — mostly for start, stop and restart functionality.  You can set these aliases to be whatever you want.  Or ignore them.  I just find them helpful.

alias apache_start="sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start"

alias apache_restart="sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart"

alias apache_stop="sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop"

5. Install MySQL 5

(Note that you might need to re-link your MySQL sock file before you initialize and setup if this is your first time using MySQL on your system.)

sudo port install mysql5-server +universal

sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql #initialze mysql

sudo port load mysql5-server #set mysql to autostart at boot

sudo /opt/local/bin/mysqld_safe5 #start

#create symbolic links to not have to type in mysql5 every time:

sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/mysql5 /opt/local/bin/mysql

sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/mysqladmin5 /opt/local/bin/mysqladmin

More info: http://matthewcarriere.com/2008/04/02/installing-mysql-on-mac-os-x-leopard-using-macports/

6. Install php5 (with apache2, mysql and pear support)

sudo port install php5 +apache2 +mysql5 +pear +universal

7. Activate PHP

sudo cp /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini-development /opt/local/etc/php5/php.ini

cd /opt/local/apache2/modules

sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs -a -e -n "php5" libphp5.so

8. Move Snow Leopard’s standard Apache out of the regular path

sudo mv /usr/sbin/apachectl /usr/sbin/apachectl-leopard

9. Move your new Apache into the path

(you might not need the first 2 steps, but I’m working on a totally clean Leopard build, so I don’t have these directories yet)

sudo mkdir /usr/local

sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin

sudo ln -s /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl /usr/local/bin/apachectl

10. Move Leopard’s bundled PHP out of the way

sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php-leopard

11. Do some Apache configuration for PHP:

(all of these are modifications to the httpd.conf file located here: /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf)

a. Add index.php to the list of DirectoryIndex:

<IfModule dir_module>

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

</IfModule>

b. Add handlers for PHP files:

# Add handling for PHP files

<IfModule php5_module>

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

</IfModule>

This block can go anywhere in the httpd.conf — but it’s probably best to keep the module handlers in alphabetical order.

c. Restart Apache

If you added the alias to your bash profile, you can now do apache_restart. Otherwise, enter:

sudo apachectl restart

11. Include user Sites directories (enable the following file by un-commenting it):

# User home directories

Include conf/extra/httpd-userdir.conf

12. Re-link mysql.sock:

sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

This step is essential so everyone can agree where MySQL is living on the system and how to connect to it.  Before I did this, Apache and PHP seemed to be able to access MySQL, and I could access MySQL from the command line, but programs like SequelPro couldn’t find the MySQL socket.  This step seems to correct that problem and let everyone play nicely.

** OPTIONAL **

These steps are optional — certainly not essential, but I find them to be very helpful tools for web development.

13. Install Git/Subversion (Version Control)

I personally have become a huge fan of Git.  I want to encourage you to become a fan too if you aren’t already.

You can install Git using Mac OSX installer.

Alternatively, if you want to keep with Subversion (or, say, you need both), do this:

sudo port install subversion +universal

This installs the latest version of Subversion on the system — which is then used for SVN access from the command line, from Eclipse, from SCPlugin, etc.

14. Install GitX/SCPlugin

You’ll now want a way to interface with your version control system of choice.  My favorite interface for Git so far is GitX.  It’s much more for tracking revisions and simple commits than for branches and complex merges.  For those you’ll need the command line.  But for simple tracking and commits (what you do from day to day), GitX is for you.  Download GitX here.

If, instead/in addition, you’re looking for a tool to interact with Subversion, I recommend SCPlugin.

http://scplugin.tigris.org/

SCPlugin is a great little tool that integrates Subversion access with the MacOS Finder and lets you do all of your basic SVN commands from there (checkout, update, revert, etc).  It doesn’t give you deep, deep access into SVN commands like version checkout or repository browsing, but for lazy commands like checkout and update, it’s great.

15. Install CocoaMySQL / SequelPro

CocoaMySQL 0.7b6

CocoaMySQL-SBG 0.7.1

Of those two I prefer 0.7b6 – It seems perfectly stable to me.

CocoaMySQL is an awesome little MySQL editor / browser based on the CocoaMySQL codebase.  I’ve been using it for years and I’ve found it’s a lot faster than entering SQL commands in the Terminal or dealing with PHPMyAdmin (which is super-slow even running locally).

CocoaMySQL lets you manage DBs effortlessly. I find it’s great for DB creation (when you’re still sketching out a project and want to play around with table structure), and for common tasks like importing and exporting.

It’s a native MacOS application, so it’s really zippy and it lets you do local and remote DB access.  And it plays nice with all of the components we’ve installed so far.

I highly recommend it.

The only drawback is that the codebase for CocoaMySQL has been abandoned.  It’s been picked up by the SequelPro project, but honestly these guys have a ways to go before their product matches CocoaMySQL (like — they still need to add user administration).  By the time you read this maybe they’ve added some features.  If not, I’d say CocoaMYSQL still works beautifully — even though the code has been abandoned.

If you want SequelPro, though, you can get it here:

http://www.sequelpro.com/

16. ADVANCED – Virtual Hosts

I first experimented with Virtual Hosts when I started doing WordPress development — mostly because WordPress seems much happier with shorter real world style urls like:

http://radio.local

than those you’d typically see running on your local box:

http://localhost/~jeff/projects/wordpress/radio-station

But once I started playing with these, I decided it was MUCH easier to be able to deal with these super-short urls (think Bit.ly for your local box) than to have to type in the whole thing.  It’s made my life a lot simpler, so I figured I’d pass along the info.

Note that when you choose a host name, you’ll want to choose one that doesn’t exist on the web.  You’re basically overriding your machine’s host lookup functionality — hard coding urls to corresponding locations on your local disk — and thereby bypassing DNS lookup.  So if you pathed http://www.google.com to your local disk, your computer wouldn’t be able to find the real google until you undid the Virtual host.  So be careful.

I typically choose a hostname that includes the suffix .local.  That’s never given me any problems (eg. projects.local, flash.local, radio.local).

Let’s begin.

You’ll be dealing with 3 files on this:

• httpd.conf
• httpd-vhosts.conf
• hosts

Which, if you followed the steps above, are located at:

• /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
• /opt/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
• /private/etc/hosts

a. Enable Apache’s Virtual Host configuration

in httpd.conf, uncomment the Virtual Hosts line:

Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

This will allow you to add hosts to your vhosts configuration file.

b. Add host locations

open the vhosts file in your favorite text editor:

/opt/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

The first thing you’ll want to do here is comment out the default examples they give you (the ones that include ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com).  You might want them as a reference, but you don’t want them to be active.  Comment them out.

Next you’ll add your host.  Substitute in values below to correspond to your build and the hostname you choose:

<VirtualHost *:80>

DocumentRoot "/Users/USERNAME/PATH"

ServerName hostname.suffix

</VirtualHost>

Typically life is easier if you choose a disk path inside of your Sites directory.  If you don’t you might need to do some more file permission configuration.

In my case, the host I added is:

<VirtualHost *:80>

DocumentRoot "/Users/jeff/Sites/projects"

ServerName projects.local

</VirtualHost>

So now Apache knows that when it’s told to serve any files referenced by the url projects.local, it’ll serve them from the path I’ve given it in my Sites directory.  There are other arguments you can add to the VirtualHost node, but this is all you need.

c. Add host names to your hosts file

Next you need to tell the machine that when you ask for that particular server name, you want it to ask the local Apache server to serve it.  Editing this file is globally applicable to all browser applications — so once you edit this file, programs like Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc will all serve up your local page instead of looking the url up with the friendly neighborhood DNS.

Your machine already does this to a certain extent — for example, the ‘localhost’ prefix is already set up via the hosts file so that the machine knows to look to the local Apache server, rather than out on the web.  What we’re doing is adding one or many shortcuts that mimic this behavior — but which point to more specific locations on disk.

Open your hosts file:

/private/etc/hosts

and add the line:

127.0.0.1     hostname.suffix

(so in my case I added):

127.0.0.1     projects.local

then save the file.

d. Restart Apache

Go back to the terminal and restart apache:

sudo apachectl restart

Now you should be all set.  Open up your browser and point it towards the virtual host you just made. In our case that’s:

http://projects.local

And your browser should serve up that url like magic. ;)

Here’s someone’s take on Pulp Fiction:

You can also watch Good Will Hunting.

This Google Wave thing seems like a lot of fun.  Can the rest of us get invites now please?

Apparently it’s a collaboration between Blu and David Ellis who are… well I’m not actually sure who they are.  But they’re pretty amazing.

Thanks FormFiftyFive.

Pretty hilarious.  And kind of sums up the way I feel about the movie (and Tom Hanks two (!!!!) academy awards).

These guys have other ones too: 28 Days Later and Kill Bill.  I like this one best.

And apparently there’s an ‘In 5 Seconds’ genre as well, although the only ones I’ve found of those are not so funny (which is sad.  ‘Titanic in 5 Seconds’ seems like a pretty easy layup).

Thanks BuzzFeed

I don’t know much about Fool’s Gold, but they sound like an interesting project…

Microsoft is now encouraging people to host “launch parties” to honor the release of Windows 7.  No.  I’m not kidding.

Now you too can help usher in a whole new era of mediocrity.  Forget all those parties you threw to help Obama get elected.  This is bigger.  Much, much bigger. And space is limited so you have to act now.  Hurry.  Your multicultural friends of all ages are waiting.

Only Microsoft could make technology look even less appealing than late-night infomercial products.

I swear.  Microsoft, next time you need an idea for an ad campaign or a promotion, just give me a call.  Me and my friends in your target demographic have lost cocktail napkins with better ideas of appearing “hip” and “with it.”

In honor of this latest blunder, here are a few of the funnier Microsoft parodies I came across while researching this:

Man I love anything that makes fun of Clippy.

Thanks Gawker for getting the ball rolling.

UPDATE: People seem to be working round the clock on this one.  There’s already a hilarious (dirty) parody of the Windows 7 House Party video.

Great work, people.  And thanks for the tip, Wired.

Check this out:

1. The logo is blurry.  Maybe they’re trying to reduce the file size?  But man. I think that’s a no-no.  Maybe it’s worth the extra K or two to have the logo be sharp?

2. The borders on all of their photos in the (freaking annoying) Highlights section are totally out of whack:

Come on Facebook! Pull yourself together!  It’s not the weekend yet!  Put down the margarita, re-save your logo, tweak your CSS and THEN you can leave for your rafting trip.  K?

World Cinema, the Cohen Brothers contribution featuring the amazingly talented Josh Brolin, is great (and apparently until recently, very hard to find).  Have a look see:

Apparently a lot of filmmakers contributed to Chacun son Cinema including Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Roman Plolanski and David Lynch — and all of their films are included in the DVD.  But somehow World Cinema was omitted.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, it’s now been released in Technicolor!

Thanks interwebs!  And thanks VSL!

Google: Gmail Outage Was Our Bad

So, yeah.  If you hadn’t heard it from 20 different places, GMail’s servers were down yesterday.  There was a massive unanticipated routing problem when they tried to do a routine server upgrade.  These things happen.  It was not a big deal.  It was not the end of the world.  The entire outage lasted less than 100 minutes (I’ve had power outages last 3 days.  Stop whining, internet.)

So fine.  It happened.  And it sucked for about as long as it takes you to go to lunch and come back.  And Google explained the whole thing.   And issued a huge apology. Seems like that should be it, right?

So why does Jennifer Van Grove have to be so snotty?

That’s one big oops Google. But it’s nice to see that you’re publicly apologizing for the outage and attesting to the fact that you will do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. Here’s hoping you stick to that.

Google owes you nothing my dear. They’re a free service. They’ve been free since they started.  And they’re nice.  And they’re incredibly transparent (compare an apology like this to Apple’s App Store Rejection Process).

There needs to be a little professionalism in blogging.  That, to me, would be the great loss inherent in the death of traditional news media.  At least The New York Times can just report a story and not be complete dicks about it in the process.

I think this is part of a bigger discussion going on right now in blogging — especially in terms of anonymity and criticism (I’m, at the moment, trying to understand Time Out New York Theater editor David Cote’s  beef with George Hunka).

But in the end it comes down to — do you really need to populate the internet with a re-blog of a dead story just so you can bitch about it?  Try Facebook.  Or Twitter.

Or is it that you really don’t have anything to say?  In which case, maybe keep quiet?

UPDATE: Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch seems to be a bit crabby about it too. Seriously. Was it just a slow news day?  The only thing you have to talk about it to re-post a blog post from the Official GMail Blog and then bitch about them?  That’s some great journalism.  Hey, New York Times! you can close up shop!  We have a replacement for you!

Why not write an article about how a lot of big companies have growing pains (Facebook goes down all the time.  Or Twitter!  Jesus!) or a discussion of how Google’s massive, elegant server architecture system is still prone to human error?  Or a suggestion of how to improve it?

I originally created Geek Chic primarily as a way to share things I thought were cool.  Usually snagged from my daily trolling of the internet, I’d post a few gems that caught my eye.  Call it re-blogging, call it regurgitating.  Call it whatever you’d like.  I saw it as an electronic way of curating and sharing a collection of things I thought more people should see.

With the advent of Twitter, the evolution of Facebook and now the more social integration points of Google Reader (my primary means of ingestion / procrastination), there seem to be more and more ways to share things you think are cool with the rest of the world.  And it’s becoming easier and easier — for example with Google Reader, all I have to do is click one button and I can share a post I think is interesting.  Clicking another button, I can instantly post a link to Twitter or Facebook. Done.

So the question arises, what good is this blog?

One answer to that question is my sort of secondary reason for creating this blog.  I occasionally like to rant and rave and share my opinions.  And it’s easier on the people around me, I find, if I post them online so they can stop reading when I’ve started to annoy them.  For those of you who like reading what I have to say, I guarantee that will continue.  But it feels even more narcissistic than Twitter tends to be for me to want to turn this blog exclusively into a soapbox for my rants and raves.  There are enough opinions roaming free on the internet (just look at how many people threw in their 2 cents about the FCC’s Google Voice inquiry).

So the question remains, what is this for?

There is something to be said for the blog format as a means of curating content.  If I want to show off things that I think are interesting, intriguing and cool, a blog is still a better format than the others I mentioned above.  Facebook’s information stream is a complete mess — it’s very easy to track down things that were posted 5 minutes ago, but anything before that is lost.  Facebook is a great way for me to aggregate things from my friends, but not a great way for me to see what any one person likes or has been up to.  Even the profile feed is so cluttered with nonsense that major topics get lost.  So curating is, basically, out the window.  And while Twitter may be better at letting people identify things I think are cool and my (very brief) opinions, it’s not all that interesting to look at.  I’m a very visual person. I like pictures and video.  That’s primarily what I post around here.  Posting links to these things via bit.ly just isn’t quite the same.

Google Reader maybe comes the closest to what I’m trying to do in terms of being able to re-post and comment on content.  The interface is easy, and sharing is a snap.  You can also post notes to your feed (basically the equivalent of a blog post — or more specifically a container for one of my rants). It’s not possible to customize the look of it, which is not ideal for me — I like to design things (event though this blog might not look like it lately) and dig around in the guts of the application to customize it (thank you, WordPress!).  With the shared feed, what you share is what you get.  And you can’t really change or pare down any of the content you’ve shared — so for example if the title of the post is 500 characters of Korean or the post is 5 pages long and you share it, that’s what shows up.  But it’s a pretty good alternative and I could definitely see myself using it more extensively.

So seriously, what is this blog for?

I can’t give you a great answer on that one.  I’m certainly leaning towards posting more of my own content — photos from Flickr and videos I shoot — rather than re-blogging content.  I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile now (you have no idea how many photos I have trapped inside of Aperture.  Be afraid.).  In addition, though, I might try to find some way (read WordPress Plugin) of integrating content from several sources into my blog — maybe pulling in content from Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader and Flickr in addition to posting my own (long-winded) opinions.  If there’s a good way to do it, I think that’ll be the best way to keep doing what I want to do with this blog: curating things that I think are cool (including things I’ve made) in order to share myself and my ideas — my personality — with my friends and the internet at large.  I think that’s what a blog is for — sharing yourself with the world.  I’m interested in continuing to do that, but I want to find a better way to do it.

Anyway, all of that is to say there will be some changes coming to the site. It might be rocky at first figuring out how to get all of these services to play nice with one another, but I think I can do it.

Cross your fingers and look for something new to pop up here any minute now.

Until then, thanks for reading!

-J