Picking up Dvorak
No special reason for it, but I decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I’ve been curious about it for awhile, but never thought I had the time. It’s definitely easier on my hands than the Qwerty layout and should eventually give me a speed boost. Ultimately, I just want to be a better touch typist and take care of my hands.
As it turns out it’s pretty easy to get started in most OS environments. In OSX it’s as easy as visiting System Preferences -> International -> Input Menu (Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Details… in Windows)and adding the Dvorak or Dvorak-Qwerty layout. Both get you running with the alternate layout, but the Dvorak-Qwerty layout has the special ability to revert back to a Qwerty layout when you hold down the Command or Option keys. That’s nice for keyboard shortcuts that are more about position than anything else. You can also switch between all your layouts with the keyboard shortcut Command+Option+Space (Alt+Shift in Windows I think).
To practice I’ve been using these lessons, but it’s nice to have something to track your progress too. So I grabbed Dvorak7min and got it running in Terminal.
$ cd /usr/local/src/
$ curl http://www.linalco.com/ragnar/dvorak7min-1.6.1.tar.gz | $ tar xfc -
$ cd dvorak7min-1.6.1.tar.gz
You’ll need to uncomment this line, (remove the #)
#CC = gcc
now we can build and install.
$ make
$ sudo make install
Now you can use the tutor by firing up Terminal and running dvorak7min.
Have fun!
RMagick on OSX revisited
Dan Benjamin posted another nice getting started article, this time on installing RMagick on OSX from source. I tried it and things went smoothly, awesome right?
Well, a little bit later came a nice howto to make snazzy Web 2.0-like graphics using RMagick. It sounded sweet and I tried it, I even had Joe time how long it would take so we could compare it to a typical Photoshop workflow. From copy to paste and execution the whole process took about 6 seconds. There was a problem though…no text. I investigated and in order to annotate the graphics, Ghostscript needs to be installed. There’s a nice FAQ for OSX that uses Darwinports, but if you’d like to stay in the original spirit of Dan’s original article and install it under /usr/local/ you’ll need to try the following:
cd /usr/local/src/
curl http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ghostscript/ghostscript-8.54-gpl.tar.gz | tar xfz -
cd ghostscript-8.54-gpl/
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..
curl ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz | tar xfz -
sudo mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript
cd ImageMagick-6.2.8
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo gem uninstall rmagick
sudo gem install rmagick
That gives you ghostscript and the ghostscript fonts, and voila annotated graphics!
Getting MySQL5 to play nice with PHP5
I’ve been trying to get my fresh install of Tiger up and running and decided to take a crack at MySQL5 and the latest PHP5. So I grabbed the handy package from MySQL AB and installed MySQL and the included startup item and preference pane. Easy, same as with their earlier packages.
Then I grabbed the latest PHP source (5.1.2) and set out to find the perfect configure options. I wasn’t interested in having everything on, but I thought it would be cool to get as much working with what I already had installed as possible. Here’s what I wound up with:
./configure —prefix=/usr/local
—program-suffix=5 —enable-fastcgi
—enable-force-cgi-redirect —with-openssl
—with-kerberos —with-zlib —with-curl
—with-ldap —with-xsl —with-pgsql
—with-pdo-pgsql —with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql
—with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config
—with-pdo=shared
—with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql
—with-pdo-sqlite —enable-sqlite-utf
—enable-bcmath —enable-exif —enable-soap
—enable-dba —with-db4=/opt/local
—enable-ftp
This includes native Tiger supported features, PostgreSQL, MySQL5 and FastCGI, some of which I installed through Darwinports.
Update: It works fine now with all the latest sources, with no manipulation neccessary. Weird. I’ll leave the rest for history sake.
Okay, so maybe it’s not that minimal, but it didn’t work anyway. The process kept coming to a halt when checking support for MySQLi. The configure script couldn’t seem to find the MySQL shared libraries. MySQL was running, I installed it alright, but as I found out the [MySQL AB OSX package was missing the headers needed to compile MySQLi](http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.mysqli.php#60654 properly). So I had to compile them myself. If you’re trying to compile PHP5 with the MySQL AB binary package and getting a MySQL’s missing error try the following:
- Grab the MySQL5 source package
- Open it up and run
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared
- Compile it, but don’t install it.
make
- Copy the libraries to the MySQL directory.
cp libmysql/.libs/libmysqlclient.15.0.0dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/
- Make some symlinks.
ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.0.0dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.0.0dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.dylib
- Retry compiling PHP5.
Thanks to the original poster, and I hope it helps more people.
