Electric Mind Control Blog

Had to screw around a bit today to get xdebug running on my development macbook pro.

I compile my own AMP stack from source, so my setup is a little different than most.

On my laptop, apache and php both live in /apache2, so my php binary is at /apache2/php/bin/php, and php.ini lives in /apache2/php/lib/php.ini

Here’s what I did to make xdebug work:

# cd /apache2/php/bin

# pecl install xdebug

Which gave me a shiny new xdebug.so in /apache2/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613

Pecl then lied to me, and said I should add “extension=xdebug.so” to my php.ini

That didn’t work.  I got message like:

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘./xdebug.so’ – (null) in Unknown on line 0

in apache’s error_log

What did work was adding the following line to php.ini, and restarting apache:

zend_extension=/apache2/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/xdebug.so

Now, this directly contradicts what my default php.ini said about not using directory information in the extension line, but fiddling with extension_dir didn’t seem to work for some reason.

Anyway, this worked for me.

Worth noting.  I still get some junk in apache’s error_log that looks like:

“Failed loading xdebug.so:  (null)”

but xdebug appears to be functioning properly (I get pretty-printed var_dumps, and the profiler will write cachegrind files just fine)

Today I released the first public release of a trivial little plugin for wordpress that I wrote.

It simply picks a random quote from a unix fortune cookie file, and inserts it into your wordpress template.

I wrote it when I created this blog, to enable that random tagline you see in the top-left, under the blog title.

For More Information, visit the GoodFortune Home Page

Or just download the GoodFortune Plugin now.

Zsuzsa got a great opportunity back in NYC, about which I’ll probably write something at a later date.  She’s been in NY for more than a month now, while I wrapped things up in Colorado.  I’ve now driven back in my sexy new ’94 Volvo 850 turbo wagon, with a good friend who was kind enough to take the road trip with me.

The hideous rainstorm over eastern PA, NJ, and NYC defeated our dream of making the whole trip in 24 hours door-to-door.  Ended up taking more like 27.  The storm was pretty intense, but the car (and the fancy tires it came with, I guess) did really well.  Lucky it came with good tires and wipers, otherwise we’d probably have had to stop and wait out the storm — that’s how bad it was.

Now to go check out the digs Zsuzsa has hooked up for the short-term in the city, have some supper, and generally reunite….

So I guesst his means I’m once again a New-Yorker.

I was updating a site that was built using prototypejs, and needed an image carousel element.  I ran across the prototype-ui project, which has just the right kind of code.  While the documentation seems pretty good, there was no obvious (to me) “bare-bones” demo that I could peek at to see how to set up a basic carousel.  So, I made one, and put it up here: Prototype-UI Carousel Bare Bones Demo/Tutorial

The New Denver Ad Club hosted Jason Fried of 37signals the other night (Thursday, 7/31/08).  I convinced a couple of folks from the o2 Group to come along and listen to what he had to say.

It was a bit funny, watching the schism between product-centric people like Jason and client-services people (like most agency people) flare up.  However, I find that a lot of what Jason talked about was what I tend to agitate for when starting new client relationships.  Client-services people are generally terrified of saying things like “We think we can do something great for $X, let’s get started”.  My thinking is that if you do good work, and are worth what you’re getting paid, this can serve as a great filter for clients and projects.  Clients that want everything specced out, discussed, wire-framed, etc, before they open their checkbook are just asking for free work.

I managed to get a decent audio recording on my laptop, and took some notes.  Here are the notes and audio.  Perhaps I’ll add more commentary later:

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This little project prompted the creation of this blog.

After I suggested to some folks on the nyphp “talk” list that compiling your own daemons from scratch isn’t painful so long as you maintain some scripts to do it for you, Dan Horning called my bluff.

So instead of just dumping some stuff on a server, I went all out and created a blog (since I have some other code I want to publish sooner or later, anyway).

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I did it.

Finally.

After having created various blogs for various people, I finally broke down and made my own.

I probably owe some people some money now.  And that hat is looking mighty tasty.

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