Running down the questions in order:

1. More than one answer.
2. Changes over time.
3. Probably OK. Maybe.
4. Changes over time.
5. More than one answer.
6. Possibly OK, but very nearly phone book info, honestly.
7. I don’t remember.
8. Not a well-defined answer at all.

Seriously? These are protecting access to my financial data? This is just one reason I don’t attach PayPal to any account I couldn’t close in a second.

I’m one of the maintainers of our PKI-enablement library, PKIF. It’s open source, cross platform, and does a lot. Our main target platforms are Red Hat, Windows and Solaris 10. Every once in a while, I’ll build and test elsewhere mainly to make sure accidental assumptions haven’t crept into our code or build process. Tonight, I gave it a run on OS X Leopard and was just amazed at how much “just worked” for free (or for minor tweaks to the build system, which will be folded into the next release) especially in the GUI library and test applications. You won’t mistake it for something developed from the ground up for the Mac, but you can certainly use it. I’m particularly surprised at how well the GUI works without even a little tweaking of the interface for Mac, all thanks to wxWidgets.

I’d suggest not trying this at home until you see 2.1.6 on the sourceforge site, though, as the ease of accomplishing this is an indirect result of many improvements to our build scripts, which will be available for download with 2.1.6.

As for the worst, most of the stinkers they name deserve to be there; not the “toilet seat” tangerine and blueberry iBooks, though. Those were great, solid machines and among the first inexpensive machines with available built-in WiFi. But even if you think they’re bad, the hideous ball of suck that was the PowerBook 1400 has to overshadow them. And every machine Apple’s produced since, to be honest.

OpenSolaris now feels like it just may fit the bill. It’s got a package manager that is the equal of deb/apt. Sun purchased VirtualBox and has really made it hum with SunOS 5.11 as the host. And with OpenSolaris, they seem to finally be serious about making sure Solaris runs well on non-Sun hardware. In my house, Sun has just eaten Canonical’s lunch. I should mention that that’s a net gain of $0 for them in my house. But in the houses I advise and configure, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Among other things, since my desktop now runs Solaris, it’ll become a first class citizen for the software I maintain.

Since the different notes I found through google all have undesirable side effects (IMO), here’s how I did it. My goal was to minimize lasting impact on my system (i.e. I’d like to delete /Applications/MAMP and have everything back to normal, more or less) and minimal deviation from the standard MAMP install.

These notes were taken while setting up symfony 1.0 on MAMP 1.7.

1. Download and install MAMP.
2. Create a file called “MAMP terminal.command” with the following content:
   #!/bin/bash<br /> env PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin:/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin:$PATH bash -i
3. Make that file executable.
4. Double-click it to get a terminal that has the MAMP stuff on the path. This is where I feel many of the other documented installs went wrong. Most had you symlinking MAMP binaries into /usr/bin! The point of MAMP for me is that it’s a self-contained installation for development purposes. I decidedly do not want it to get in my way when I don’t explicitly tell it to.
5. Make sure your pear directories are all safely under /Applications/MAMP:

   bash-3.2$ pear config-show
   Configuration (channel pear.php.net):
   =====================================
   Auto-discover new Channels     auto_discover    <not set>
   Default Channel                default_channel  pear.php.net
   HTTP Proxy Server Address      http_proxy       <not set>
   PEAR server [DEPRECATED]       master_server    pear.php.net
   Default Channel Mirror         preferred_mirror pear.php.net
   Remote Configuration File      remote_config    <not set>
   PEAR executables directory     bin_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin
   PEAR documentation directory   doc_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/doc
   PHP extension directory        ext_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20050922
   PEAR directory                 php_dir          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php
   PEAR Installer cache directory cache_dir        /tmp/pear/cache
   PEAR data directory            data_dir         /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data
   PEAR Installer download        download_dir     /tmp/pear/cache
   directory
   PHP CLI/CGI binary             php_bin          /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/bin/php
   php.ini location               php_ini          <not set>
   PEAR Installer temp directory  temp_dir         /tmp/pear/temp
   PEAR test directory            test_dir         /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/test
   Cache TimeToLive               cache_ttl        3600
   Preferred Package State        preferred_state  stable
   Unix file mask                 umask            22
   Debug Log Level                verbose          1
   PEAR password (for             password         <not set>
   maintainers)
   Signature Handling Program     sig_bin          /usr/local/bin/gpg
   Signature Key Directory        sig_keydir       /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/pearkeys
   Signature Key Id               sig_keyid        <not set>
   Package Signature Type         sig_type         gpg
   PEAR username (for             username         <not set>
   maintainers)
   User Configuration File        Filename         /Users/yourusername/.pearrc
   System Configuration File      Filename         /Applications/MAMP/conf/php5/pear.conf
   

   Note that you may need to move ~/.pearrc out of the way if you’ve used PEAR outside MAMP on your system in order to get your config to look like this one.

6. Install symfony:

   bash-3.2$ peardev channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
   bash-3.2$ peardev install symfony/symfony
   

   Note that if your user owns /Applications/MAMP you do not need to use sudo here.

7. Add an alias to /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf:

   Alias /sf /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf
   <Directory "/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf">
       AllowOverride All
       Allow from All
   </Directory>
   

8. Set up your symfony project
9. Set the document root in MAMP (Preferences -> Apache) to /Users/yourusename/mamproot
10. Symlink /Users/yourusername/mamproot to your symfony project’s web directory.
11. Stop and start Apache.
12. Visit http://localhost:8888/ and confirm that you have a nicely decorated symfony welcome page.
]]> http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/14/symfony-and-mamp/feed/ 0 http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/12/is-october-1-1993-upon-us/ http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/12/is-october-1-1993-upon-us/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:37:44 +0000 geoff http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/12/is-october-1-1993-upon-us/ Word on the street is that Verizon is going to stop carrying most of the Usenet. Apparently this is how they plan to implement their settlement with the NY AG. You have to suspect the rest of the mob who’s settling will use similarly coarse filters. With that, at least in the alt hierarchy, September could at last be over. I’m sorry to see it go, for a reason like this anyway.
]]> http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/12/is-october-1-1993-upon-us/feed/ 0 http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/11/setting-up-svn-and-trac/ http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/11/setting-up-svn-and-trac/#comments Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:26:35 +0000 geoff http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/11/setting-up-svn-and-trac/ I’ve finally decided to bring my personal projects out of the dark ages. After using CVS for years and years, I’m making the leap to Subversion. Git and friends look appealing, but, the fact is that “a little better than CVS” does it for me at this point. Plus I understand Subversion and the tool support on the Mac is excellent. For my server, I’m using VirtualBox 1.6.2 as the host and Ubuntu JEOS 8.04 as the guest. These notes may or may not be useful for others. I’m just trying to keep track of what I did here.

I used a VirtualBox machine set for Ubuntu with 512MB RAM and 3 virtual disk files.

The first is 1GB and contains only the root partition. The second is 2GB and has swap, /tmp and /var. (256MB, 700MB and 1.2GB respectively) The third is 8GB and has /home (2GB) and /srv (6.1GB). /srv is where subversion and trac data files will land. Here’s what it looks like after the installation:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1            1012M  324M  638M  34% /
/dev/sdc5             1.9G   35M  1.8G   2% /home
/dev/sdc6             6.1G  142M  5.7G   3% /srv
/dev/sdb5             662M   17M  612M   3% /tmp
/dev/sdb7             1.2G  198M  875M  19% /var

On the first reboot, all I did from the virtualbox console was find out the MAC address of the network adapter so I could assign a fixed IP in my DHCP server, then

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install openssh-server

That done, I rebooted the virtual machine to be sure that the kernel was current and went to install the VirtualBox additions. Since the JEOS installation is intentionally light, before the additions could be installed, a few packages were needed:

sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Then installing them was simple enough. After choosing “Install Guest Additions” from the VirtualBox GUI, all it took was

sudo mount /media/cdrom
sudo sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
sudo umount /media/cdrom

After that, I shut down the machine to start it headless. With the VM stopped, from the host:

VBoxManage startvm brain -type vrdp

]]> http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/06/11/setting-up-svn-and-trac/feed/ 0 http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/03/20/turns-out-verizon-was-bluffing/ http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/03/20/turns-out-verizon-was-bluffing/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:49:41 +0000 geoff http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/03/20/turns-out-verizon-was-bluffing/ Auction 73 is over. Most of the spectrum that will be freed up by the discontinuation of analog television broadcasting in 2009 has been sold off. According to Engadget, Verizon and AT&T bought most of it. Verizon had previously warned the FCC that the open access rules it was imposing on the spectrum would prevent telcos from bidding on it. Looks like they decided it was valuable anyway.
]]> http://geoff.mollyandgeoff.com/blog/2008/03/20/turns-out-verizon-was-bluffing/feed/ 0