Where I'm At

I haven't been able to get out much, so I'll show y'all where I'm staying:


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My 36 hour Saturday

Well, for those that haven't heard, I'm in Ohio for the next couple of weeks working on a web project. I was contracted to help a company in Ohio with the final coding and deployment of their website. I think it will be a great and exciting trip.

To get here however has been a trip. I started Saturday morning at 9am. We had a fun day and then went to my cousin's house where they were having a party. We left for the airport from the party at around 10pm. I jumped on the plane and have been traveling until just now when I landed in my hotel room.

Man, it's been a long day. It still feels like Saturday night to me even though it's well into Sunday afternoon. My trip was mostly uneventful. I flew from Portland to Chicago, Chicago to Columbus Ohio. The first part of the trip was fine except for the violent kid behind me who was having a fist fight with his tray table. That made it hard to sleep. I landed in Chicago with a three hour layover. O'Hare is a really loud airport. CNN was going loud in the terminal. This combined with the janitor with a really squeaky garbage can wheel made it really hard to sleep again. I managed an hour. The 45 minute trip to Columbus was great, quiet and bright. I landed and a woman from the agency in Ohio picked me up and took me to lunch to this great restaurant where I had some great corned beef hash. Yummy.

I'm now in my hotel room (where I'll be for the next 19 days) going over some code and waiting until a decent hour to go to sleep. I'm afraid that if I go now, I'll wake up at 2am local time and just be bored until work starts at eight. I'd rather just kick it until around 8 and hit the hay.

It's been a long Saturday today and I'm pretty sure I'll miss Sunday. But, I'm looking forward to these next three weeks of getting a lot of work done and having fun in Ohio.

Peace,
B

Airplane Landing

I've seen this a lot on the news lately and you probably have too. I just can't stop watching it.

"Well folks, Capt. Whatever here from the flight deck. We tried parrellel parking but it was just too tight a fit. We'll try it again head in."

HOW-TO: Compile PHP/Apache2.2 on OS X Leopard

I've been fighting my Leopard installation recently with getting the IMAP libraries compiled correctly. I wanted the IMAP features so that I could use my sugarCRM application better. After a lot of fighting, compiling and adjusting, I finally got a stable installation of Apache 2.2 and PHP-5.2.5 with IMAP. Here's how I did it:


I didn't want to ruin the installation of Apache2.2 that comes native on Leopard, so I started from scratch:

cd /usr/local
mkdir src
curl -O http://www.mirrorgeek.com/apache.org/httpd/httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz # a bunch of output will fly by; that's normal
cd httpd-2.2.8
./compile --enable-so --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 # a ton more output will fly by
make
sudo make install

Now we have a new apache install in your /usr/local directory. If you want to connect this installation to your usual web directory on your mac, you need to edit your httpd.conf to direct your web root folder to /Library/WebServer/Documents. You do this by executing the following commands:

sudo vi /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
Change DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs" to: DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
Next, change to
issue the vi command :wq

Your Apache Installation should be set to go now.

Before we can install php, we need to cimpile the IMAP c libraries. Go to and download these libraries at ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/ . Then, move them to your source directory with the following command:

mv ~/Downloads/[your-imap-download] /usr/local/src
./compile --prefix=/usr/local/imap
make
sudo make install

When this finishes, you can install php

PHP Installation:

Go to http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.2.5.tar.gz/from/a/mirror and download a package
On Leopard, you would issue the following command to move the package to our source directory:

mv ~/Downloads/php-5.2.5.tar.gz /usr/local/src

Now, we compile:

tar -zcvf php-5.2.5.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2/php --with-apx2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --with-imap=/usr/local/imap --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql
make
sudo make install

Following the completion of this install, you should be able to issue the command:

sudo /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

and your installation is complete. SugarCRM should recognize the imap libraries and php should run smoothly.

Please note that this is not a particularly secure installation, but will work great for local intranets to keep your users involved with the crm.

Please post comments if you run into trouble.