SEE UPDATE BELOW ORIGINAL POST:

Apparently Firefox 2.0 hangs for no apparent reason on OSX. You have to force a "quit", lose all your tabs, and then try to find the pages you were on.

Annoying as all get out. And people have been complaining about it.

Also, I wanted to get the new system set up with Apache, PHP, etc.

Of course, because Mac is the bastard stepchild of the world, Apache and PHP don't have binary installers. And though MySQL does, you still have to recompile portions of it from source, because it uses static libraries instead of shared libraries which means you can't compile PHP with MySQL support unless you compile MySQL from source, making the binary installer sort of useless.

So, while I'd have had this set up within 3-4 hours were it a Windows machine, I've been chasing down error messages, step-by-step instructions on how to install this stuff from source, and waiting for various things to compile (or barf up error messages so I can try to figure out why they won't compile).

So I think the Apple slogan needs to be changed from "Mac: It just works" to "Mac: It just works so long as you have really low expectations and don't mind pulling your hair out when you try to run any of the cool free Open Source stuff it's so easy to run on Windows."

AND NOW THE UPDATE:

Mac does come with Apache 1.33 and a 4.4.x version of PHP. Of course, the version of Apache isn't configured to actually work with PHP. You have to hack the httpd.conf file, and that's hidden from the average file search to prevent users from doing harm to themselves.

I figured it was a non-standard install and looked to install Apache 2.0 with PHP 5. That was where I ran into trouble. That was my downfall. That was the unmerry path that wasted half of my day.

Finally, after sharing this complaint with a friend, he pointed me at a step-by-step for getting WordPress working on OSX (which included the hidden location of the httpd.conf file). I followed the instructions and had everything working in a matter of minutes.

I'd actually seen a link for the WordPress instructions come up as I googled for an answer, but since I didn't want to run WordPress locally and I knew how to install WordPress on a machine where Apache/PHP/MySQL were already running, I ignored it.

Ticks me off that this would be the 10-minute answer to my question, while the other results were all WAY too complicated.

So, earlier in the Summer I got two "Ask Slashdot" submissions accepted.

The first was regarding PHP and Perl in one script. I asked because I wanted to use ImageMagick and because it would be processing user-generated text, there was no way I wanted to generate commandline code. Because the developer of MagickWand for PHP abandoned the project around the start of the year and it was still basically an alpha release, I wanted to use PerlMagick, but I wanted to program all the hard stuff (a lot of XML and math) in PHP, which I already knew.

Long story short... I'm using PHP to write the Perl scripts. The small amount of Perl that's needed is sort of "fill-in-the-blank", so I have PHP doing that, putting it all in a string, then PHP writes it to disk and then executes the perl script.

As for a good multi-format SVG converter. As long as you don't want to convert to a vector format, ImageMagick does a good job with that, rendering SVGs to a wide range of raster formats. Of course, I actually wanted to convert to both vector and raster formats, so I'm basically using 2-3 different programs, batch converting a collection of SVGs with each, then comparing the outputs and picking the best.

That is all.

Stopping by Apple's online store to check out the specs on the new Core2Duo MacBook Pros, I decided to price out my dream MacPro system and found they'd lowered prices... by a whole dollar.

Seems Apple got religion on pricing everything with 99s, not just the base systems. Upgrade to 2 gigs of RAM... was $300, now $299. Upgrade to 500 gig hard drive... was $200, now $199. My dream system came down in price a whole six dollars! Sigh.

One of my revenue streams looks poised to jump 500% this month from last month.

That's not amazing, since it was just slightly more than beer money last month. But, for the fun of it, I decided to do some factoring to see where it could go if every month it multiplied by 5.

So next month it would be 5x more than this month. The month after that 25x (5x * 5x). The month after that 125x (5x * 5x * 5x).

I figure that somewhere around my 39th birthday I'd have all the money that exists in the world, have every man woman and child on Earth indebted to me for 20 million dollars each, and officially own everything.

At that point, I believe 500% month-over-month growth would become unsustainable. :-)

- Greg

I turn 37 this week. Not sure how I feel about that. If the average life span for an American man is now 74, I just hit "middle age".

I am WAY too young to be middle-aged. Middle-aged people have always been older than me, and all things being relative, they should always be older than me.

Therefore, since I am not middle-aged.... By my declaration, the new average life expectancy for an American man is now 76. Next year it will increase to 78 and continue to increase by two years for every year I am alive so that I am always a year away from being middle-aged, but will never hit it.

And when I die at the age of 237 years old, people will say: "Oh, he died so young. He was barely middle-aged."

- Greg

The baby is doing great and he sleeps through the night. Wife is doing well and she sleeps through the night too. I'm still working on my start-up(s). I don't sleep.

Photos of the baby here.

Baby came home before the wife did. Wasn't fun. But a couple of days later, Grandma came up from L.A., wife came home, and I got a little sleep.

The baby's 29 days old and weighed in at 11 lbs. 2 oz. today. He's healthy, mostly happy, and a little champ.

If I don't send out photos at least every 4 days, my parents call and complain.

Took 2 weeks off for daddy leave, went back to work and quit. Starting up a couple of businesses.

The general plan is I go to bed between 9-10 p.m. Wife wakes me up at 3'ish, I take care of him until 9'ish, then bring him to her for feeding and a nap in the bed with her while I grab a shower and get down to work on my variety of start-up businesses in the home office.

I'm still tired.

- G

Been a hell of a week...

Saturday, the 19th, wife is 4 days overdue and her water finally breaks. But labor doesn't start. After 6 hours, they induce.

Sunday, the 20th, after 28 hours (22 in labor) she's got an infection, spiking a 103+ fever, not fully dilated yet, can't stay in labor without Pitocin, and the baby is distressed. C-section time. Baby comes out at 9 pounds, 1 ounce.

Monday, the 21st, the baby is in the NICU because it picked up some of the infection and will have to stay for a week while they give it IV antibiotics. Wife is recovering.

Thursday, the 24th, wife comes home, but baby doesn't. Do what I can to make her comfortable.

Saturday, the 26th, did you know that you can get pre-eclampsia after you've had the baby? Wife was short of breath, we called the hospital, they said to come in. Diagnosed as post-partum pre-eclampsia. They'll have to keep her a couple of days... at least one to get her stabilized and one for observation.

Monday, the 28th, son is supposed to be released from the NICU today. He's already closing in on 10 lbs. Got a hell of an appetite. Don't know if the wife is coming home, though. Maybe he'll go stay in her room at the hospital since she's in the labor recovery ward, but maybe I get to play single dad. Maybe I get them both home and we finally get to start that lovely family life we've been dreaming about.

I'm tired.

Doubt this page will get slashdotted, since it'll just be linked in my journal, but I had to put it up...

There is this house down the street that has an infestation of lawn statues, plastic plants, and other atrocities. My wife and I have been telling people about it, but we finally had to show them...

Click here to see the photos.

- Greg

As we head into the holiday season, I have a little tale to share with you all.

After our recent move, I had some PC problems. I'll spare the gory details, but I'd poked around inside, mucked about with connections and connectors and could not bring the PC back to life. It was dead for all intents and purposes.

I got on the phone with tech support on Monday, expecting to go through the annoying checklist of tests so they could be sure it was really as broken as I claimed it was and schedule an on-site repair call.

I began their tests and I felt like the guy whose car suddenly stops making that noise the moment he drives it into the shop. Darn thing was fine from the word "go", worked great, no obvious problems. Still working now.

Now here's the odd bit.

Sunday night I had some Hostess mini-donuts on my desk. I could swear I'd left like 3 or 4. But Monday morning, just half a mini-donut is left and my dead computer suddenly works.

As a child I believed that if you left a tooth under your pillow, you got money. I believed that if you left milk and cookies by the fireplace, you got presents. Is it that big a leap to believe that if you leave little chocolate donuts on your desk, you'll get computer repairs?

I tried to come up with a name for the mythical being that might do such a thing. "The Geek Fairy" seemed a bit too obvious. After a bit of brain wracking and soul searching, it hit me: Nano-Gnomes.

We live in a world of wonder and miracles. So when you're putting out your milk and cookies for Santa this month, throw in a couple of little chocolate donuts for the little Nano- Gnomes and perhaps they'll bless you with problem-free gadgetry for the coming year.

Greg

Just tried to install SuSE on my AMD64 box. What a nightmare.

I spent $119 ($80 over the $39 for the basic edition) to get AMD64 support. Even paid for express shipping because they kept putting my order on backorder status. Unfortunately, their AMD64 claim is a bit misleading. Their AMD64 edition supports the chip, but not one of the most common motherboards for the chip, apparently.

I have an ASUS SK8N with the NForce3 chipset, basically a common Opteron board that was repurposed for the AMD64 FX-51. I got it with a SATA RAID. It was the primary board I saw most builders using when the chip first came out.

Well, upon my first attempt at installing, SuSE wouldn't recognize the RAID. After a few hours of searching the web and trying a couple of possible solutions, I came upon a SuSE support forum thread which said that there were currently no 64-bit drivers for the on-the-motherboard RAID controller, there was no ETA on them, the 32-bit drivers wouldn't work with the 64-bit kernel, and the source on the 32-bit drivers needed major work to be ported to 64-bit.

Okay, fine then. IDE drives are cheap, around a buck a gig, and ATA 133 isn't all that slow (even if it is slower than two SATA 150's in a RAID 0 striping). So I'll leave Windows on my RAID and get an IDE drive to house SuSE.

After getting the IDE drive installed, I tried to install SuSE again. Lo and behold it installed, and with a shareware bootmanager, I was even able to set up a dual-drive dual-boot.

Then it came time for phase two, first boot, with a lot of the hardware recognition to happen then... My onboard LAN couldn't be recognized. More hours of searching, more attempts at workarounds... no go. So I've got a 64-bit Linux system up, but with no networking. If I want that, I'll have to go out and buy a supported card to add further redundancy to my machine and make this "free" operating system cost even more.

I'm not dogging Linux. But SuSE was **WAY** premature in putting out this edition. They were first to market with a release (i.e. non-beta) edition that supported AMD64, but in their haste to be first to market, they put out a piece of shit that doesn't have drivers for common hardware in use with the AMD64 chips.

I, for one, am demanding my money back. I'll wait a little while for x86-64 Linux to mature enough to work on my system. In the mean time, I'll try to see if there's a 32-bit distro that will work "out of the box" with my system.

And this is why Linux is having to scrabble for the hearts and minds of desktop users. Even if it's got its problems, Windows is "out of the box" functional more often than Linux is. Doesn't matter why. It is. And people don't want a learning curve. They want software that just works.

SuSE putting out piece-of-crap, premature, overpriced, boxed releases that have such limited functionality is going to hurt the reputation of Linux, especially when they're so heavily touted as being one of the distros that's supposed to be easy to use and install.

- Greg