May 2009 Archives

This airplane’s engines were tested on equipment that I designed. Happy day! See a video of their first on-wing start here.

Mediocre story, great action.

The FTC will get involved in those horrible car warranty robocalls. Finally.

Indeed, this is good news. Senator Charles Shumer (D-NY) got a robocall and got the FTC involved, which apparently, means that the FTC will actually do something about the problem.

But the article mentions that 30,000 other Americans have already complained to the FTC, too, and yet the FTC has done nothing.

So let me get this straight: 30,000 Americans… taxpaying Americans… complain to the FTC, and the FTC does nothing. But one senator who happens to get a robocall in the middle of a session complains to the FTC and they not only jump but ask “How high?”

Does anybody else see a problem with this?

Yeah, I thought so.

Mac OS X Server 10.5.7 Update breaks PHP custom installations.

Apple installs PHP v5.2.8 over your custom PHP installation, and you can know this if you dig from the main article referenced above to the security content of the update.

Here's what I did to alleviate the pain associated with the upgrade:

Before I upgraded, I backed up my configuration information (which I can use to reconfigure PHP if necessary) and current PHP installation so I can downgrade in a hurry if I can't rebuild the new PHP quickly:

php -i > ~/php-config-2009.04.13
sudo cp /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so.old
sudo cp /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.old

I then did the update.

If I were very concerned that PHP weren't working correctly and quickly, I'd have swapped the newly-installed Apple PHP with the old one and set it to running while I rebuilt PHP. I didn't need to do that, though, so I just proceeded with rebuilding and reinstalling 5.2.9, because Apple is already 0.0.1 behind the power curve (and because I was too lazy to go looking for the 5.2.8 tarball).

Once the update was done, I looked at what Apple used to configure php...

php -i

...and noticed that it wasn't all that unusual. I then backed up the Apple stuff...

sudo cp /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so /usr/libexec/apache2/libphp5.so.apple
sudo cp /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.old

...and grabbed the 5.2.9 PHP tarball from PHP.net, php-ized GD, configured it, made it, and installed it. (Your configure command might look different, of course.)

tar xjfp php-5.2.9.tar.bz2

cd php-5.2.9/ext/gd

phpize

cd ../..

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch ppc64 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -bind_at_load" ./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --disable-dependency-tracking --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-ldap=/usr --with-kerberos=/usr --enable-cli --with-zlib-dir=/usr --enable-trans-sid --with-xml --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --enable-dbx --enable-sockets --with-iodbc=/usr --with-curl=/usr --with-config-file-path=/etc --sysconfdir=/private/etc --with-mysql-sock=/var/mysql --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config --with-mysql=/usr --with-openssl --with-xmlrpc --with-xsl=/usr --without-pear --with-freetype-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-png-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-gd --with-ttf --with-iconv=/usr/local/lib --enable-gd-imgstrttf --enable-gd-native-ttf

(That's all on one line, and note that I'm compiling a universal binary here for four architectures--why, I don't remember, exactly, but you probably won't need anything before "./configure" unless you're compiling for multiple architectures.)

make

make test

sudo make install

I then restarted Apache2 with Server Manager and PHP5 was happy again.

You have got to see these pictures of the Manhattan flyover that caused so much controversy last week.