Michael Bianco

Compiling PHP 5.2.11 on OS X 10.5.8

I’ve detailed this problem before but yet again I’ve encountered the infamous iconv compile error. This bug is not new yet it still has not been fixed in the latest PHP release. When compiling a custom version of PHP with libraries such as libxml and iconv the make process results in a linking error relating to the iconv library. The problem arises because I have two versions of iconv installed – the macports version in addition to the standard installation. A linking conflict arises and to eliminate the error a linking search order change (which is detailed in my previous blog post) must be made…

NetSuite PHPToolkit & Uncaught Empty Search Results Error

So far my experience with NetSuite has been less than favorable. Their developer resources aren’t bad, but they aren’t terribly good either. I’m working on a project that involves searching through contacts & selectively modifying contact data based on search results. In some cases the search will return an empty result set – just like any normal search should. I would have thought that the PHP developer kit was mature enough to handle an empty search set, but apparently not…

Fun With PyObjc: Growl Notification Hell

Most of the time PyObjc is wonderful to work in, I love the python libraries and language. Other times it just makes me angry. It seems, at least initially, that PyObjc (2.2b3, the default installation with 10.6 snow leopard) does not work with the Growl framework. You can register your application with growl fine, but if you try to push notifications to growl nothing happens…

Create TGZ Automator Service

With Snow Leopard came some nice refinements to automator actions. However, all existing automator actions had to be recreated as services in order to be accessed through the Finder’s contextual menu. One automator action which I used fairly often was the create tgz workflow. I always found that action to be fairly useful so I recreated it as an action. Another unfortunate change with Snow Leopard was the elimination of input managers. This eliminated the convenient F-Script injection functionality that was present in F-Script anywhere. Luckily this functionality has been recreated using an automator service. Nice work!

PyObjc & Seemingly Incorrect Return Value Mismatch

I’ve come to love developing in PyObjc. Sure, it has its quirks, isn’t the fastest, and isn’t the easiest to debug when something goes really wrong (aka imperfect integration with the xcode IDE); but it is fast to develop in. Almost every seemingly complex task that has come my way has been 50% completed by some open source python module that I can include in a commercial app without any licensing trouble. However, the other day I came across a bug (at least, what I thought was a bug) that seemed very blaringly obvious and for a production version of a scripting bridge…

Compiling PHP 5.2 With Iconv, Soap, and Others on OS X 10.5

I’ve already posted some notes about compiling PHP 5.2 on OS X 10.5, but I came across a couple more issues today as I recompiled the binary with soap support. After searching around a bit I finally remembered that I needed to manually edit the make file in order to get PHP compiling correctly, I found the edit that needed to be made here…

Subversion Post Commit & DreamHost Hosting

I use a combination of Trac and Subversion to manage my software development projects. Although new projects like lighthouse and git have cropped up which look very intriguing, the lack of automated installation and maintaince and my lack of free time leaves my turning back to my existing trac + svn solution. The integration between these two projects is simply spectacular and the ability to have the software hosted and easily managed on a low cost shared server like DreamHost is definitely a plus. There was one missing piece after the initial installation process of svn + trac: post commit trac integration…

PHP: Framework Faceoff

I was away from the PHP world while traveling in Europe and in four short months some nice PHP MVC frameworks seemed to crop up out of nowhere. I’m starting a fairly large project and was determined to use one of these new frameworks as the design and ‘free’ functionality that they offered seemed too good to pass up. However, there was almost too many choices. It was hard to choose between: Cake PHP, Code Igniter, Akelos, PHP Dev Shell, and many others. For me it ended up coming down to Code Igniter (CI) and Kohana…

Videobox & Mootools 1.2.x

I love MooTools. I’ve been using it before the 1.2 days; it has been great watching how much it has matured. One of the best things about MooTools is the amount of components that have been written for it: Videobox, SlimBox, and TextBoxList just to name a few. However, the switch from 1.1 to 1.2 broke alot of existing functionality and with that broke alot of the existing components. Just the other day I found just the component I was looking for: Videobox. The examples on the site looked great, but it didn’t work with the newest version of MooTools. I spent some time converting the animation code over to the new 1.2 syntax and fixing some other random bugs, you can grab the fixed version here…

Regex Revisited: Ack, SED, and TextMate

Grep has long been considered the de-facto regex command line tool for unix developers, but I’ve never really liked it. Grep has always seemed slow, buggy, and limited in its regex capabilities; I always resorted to using the built in regex functionality of TextMate or Python’s built in regex abilities. As great as Python and TextMate are, they are not a clean solution to a simple problem and do not play nicely with shell scripting. Thankfully I’ve finally found a regex tool that fulfills my expectations: ack. There is an even a “Ack in Project” TextMate Plugin (so long Grep in Project) which works blazingly fast…

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