‘If we are to accept that people choose to live in different places for reasons linked to the places themselves…’
Nearly complete bullshit if you read this to mean we all have perfectly free choices. We don’t!

Rant

Most folk live

• in the holes in which they were spawned because they can’t afford to move away or feel family ties (i.e. not the place but people: subtle but important difference)
• the best they can afford to crawl to
• where the work they can do is – or within commuting distance thereof.

I live in a Victorian stone-built basement flat not because I like it but because it’s what my partner chose and I want to be with her (family) and because I can’t afford to be elsewhere. (Edit This doesn’t mean I don’t like the flat [I do, when it’s not playing up] or that I’d choose to be away from her, just that my options are very limited and if we broke up, I’d be back in the gutter.)

This is similar to people crapping on about culture, another bollocks term. People do what they do either because they don’t know any better or are comfortable with old habits, because that is what the physical or human geography demands they do to survive or because it’s what the powers that be permit/brainwash them into doing.

Grrr!

Despite a gut-feeling that social networking in general (i.e. Twitter and FaceBook in particular) are loathsome, I’ve resurrected my Twitter account to help with my summer project.

Doing background reading to write a research proposal, so I can keep busy over the summer. Just come across the term unconference.

Any of you been to one?

It seems that the hour-long installation of Xcode on Iggy didn’t install the command-line tools: make etc. Cue even more downloading… Bah³!

Why the hell does updating Xcode need to close iTunes?
Why the hell does a completed package need an IDE anyway?

Got MacPorts but it claims that Iggy’s Xcode installation isn’t happy:
Error:
Error: No Xcode installation was found.
Error: Please install Xcode and/or run xcode-select to specify its location.
Error:

Now downloading Xcode from Mac App Store – and have discovered the craptastic Launchpad, another loathsome, pointless idea-port from iOS.

Just tried the ‘using bundled PHP’ route on Iggy, my MacPro. Normally I’d be scared of fiddling under Iggy’s bonnet-lid but right now I’m too pissed off to care.

Still no joy – about to try MacPorts on Iggy because it’s far too slow on the TiBook.

So I’m trying to work my way through a teach-yourself PHP book. Macs apparently have come with PHP since the beginning of OSX. However, either you need to enable the bundled PHP by modifying the Apache web-server configuration file or install it yourself.

Installation impedimenta

I’ve tried enabling PHP on two different macs by following the instructions here. This seems to work, in that the phpinfo() command works. Also, simple commands within PHP scripts that make HTML to display formatted text work. (With no apologies for using <font> tags instead of <span>!)

However, $variables and form-handling fail – it seems that values for variables aren’t getting through to the guts of PHP. To find out whether I’m simply keying incorrectly, I’ve tried using the scripts provided by the book’s author – still no joy.

So I thought I’d try freshly installing the most up-to-date version of PHP I could on the mac I’m using for this, my 1GHz TiBook running MacOSX 10·5. Instructions are here: I went for the MacPorts route. macPorts provides a way of installing standard Unix stuff onto the Unix underlying OSX.

I found the version of MacPorts appropriate to 10·5. It tells me it needs Xcode, Apple’s IDE. Usually Xcode comes with the installer for OSX but wasn’t included in my copy of 10·5. But it’s available from Apple’s website – you have to do a little digging for the appropriate version (3·1·4).

To get it, you need to be a registered Apple Developer. (Hollow laugh – while developing for iOS and MacOS is one of my eventual aims, I’m so far away right now it’s frightening.) Anyway I registered and then waited for the 1GB download to finish.

Xcode is now installing on the TiBook – it’s going to take about an hour to install. Then I need to install MacPorts and then find how to use it, then install and configure PHP and then see if form-handling works… Bah!

<rant>This all seems so un-necessary – why can’t there be a simple, standalone installer? If it needs to install other stuff (i.e. if there are dependencies), so be it – the installer can notify you and ask permission to install this stuff. It’s all open source, so where’s the problem. To comply with open source ideals (which I broadly agree with), the raw source code can simply be on the provider’s website or , thus providing the option for those who want to compile and install their own stuff or contribute to development. The rest of us just want to install and use software.</rant>

I have far too much in common with David Cameron. I feel sick.

Several years ago, I bought an XServe G5 because I wanted to teach myself more about servers. I gambled on buying a known-faulty machine in the belief that the purchase price plus the cost of fixing it would be less than the cost of a fully-functional one. This worked out: my total expenditure was about £300 while a known-good equivalent would have cost around £500 at the time.

repaired, then faulty again

The fault turned out to be a duff power-supply – XServalan would cut out in the middle of, or soon after, booting. After this surgery, she ran MacOS 10·5 happily – and this was very useful, especially when my MacBook Pro died and I needed to work in Adobe Creative Suite. Even though I now have Iggy, I still need a mac that can run MacOS 10·5 to run QuarkXpress 7·3 (needed for some freelance work). There are ways of flying MacOS 10·5 on an intel mac but they’re not so satisfactory, mainly due to the limited screen-size.

All was fine until last month, when the symptoms returned: XServalan wouldn’t even complete booting before shutting itself off. I’ve finally found time to replace the power supply with one from a box of XServe bits I obtained about a year ago. It’s quite a struggle to extract XServalan fully from its desk-side compartment

Let joy be unconfined: XServe has been resuscitated. His roar fills the hall.

edit

Here are screenshots of the different screen-sizes available:

• MacOS 10·5 running in VirtualBox virtual machine: limited to 1024 by 768 pixels
• MacOS 10·5 running on XServalan: limited to 1280 by 1024 pixels