31 December 2006

[oregon] Everyone's A Little Bigger, saith the Councilor

705 Interesting stuff from the Councilor.

He cites a new population estimate from PSU that marks the graduation of the charming town of Fishburg into the 15,000-up club. There's been a lot of growth out that way; a more than twofold increase since 1990.

Some of our old Portland area maps show a very modest, postage-stampy Troutdale with plenty of room between it and Stark Street. We have indeed come so far.

What interested me the most is the population of the places I've lived. I was born, the record will show, in Silverton, that town 15 miles east and 10 years behind Salem; when I was born there the population was 4,750, and it seemed stuck there for an eternity. Today? 8,900. Almost 10,000.

Something like that makes me feel much older than I actually am...or is that world-weariness, Oregonized?

Other interesting figures were that for Salem (149,305), especially vice Eugene City (148,595). I was a teenager in Salem during the days when the population went up to about 98,000 and seemed stuck there; I was so looking for that Rubicon "1" to affix itself to the city limits sign. Also, I remember all those years of being Oregon's third city; I feel vindicated that little ol' Snailem is Oregon's second city now. Eugene City was always way too uppity, anyway.

And I'm pulling for little old Gresham...at 97,745, we are --->this<--- close to having four Oregon cities with 100,000+. The drawback, of course, is that it's Gresham, the only city of its size with no downtown building over 4 stories, and therefore retains its position as the silliest major city in Oregon.

We also notice that the corporation in Oregon reputed to have no actual residents, Greenhorn, has experienced explosive growth-to 2, a 200% growth rate, certainly surpassing that of that shrinking violet, Bend.

You have more neighbors. Welcome to 2007, Oregon!

Links to your own copies of the reports can be found at the good Councilor's site: clicky!

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[liff] Things We Look Forward To In 2007

704 In no particular order:
  1. Steven Spielberg's remake of When Worlds Collide
  2. S.M Stirling's continuation of the Emberverse saga, The Sunset Lands. (sample chapters online at the authors site, but warning: it gives away the ending to A Meeting At Corvallis, so don't go to read the sample chapters until you finish that one)
  3. My big break (whatever form that happens in)
  4. Duran Duran's next album
  5. Adobe Creative Suite 3 (even if we aren't exactly swept away by the new icons)
  6. More links and blog traffic...(a guy can dream, cann'e?)
That's all we can think of for now.

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30 December 2006

[design, bits] The New Face Of Photoshop 1: The Splash Screen & The Dock

703 Here, I present to you what looks like the new splash screen for the upcoming Photoshop CS3 Standard (clicky to embiggen):


Neat. Sweet. Petite (actually not sure about that last one...). This was, by the way, processed for web display in Photoshop CS3 public beta, so it's a quick dry run as well. The interface has some interesting improvements, but that's for another program. At this point the menu item File>Save for Web... has become File>Save for Web and Devices..., so we can see that Adobe is really keen on representing on the mobile platform.

Actually, we're still torn about this new look. Sure, slick and professional–but cool to the point of being cold.

Well, like I said earlier, I suppose it will grow on me.

Moreover, here's what it looks like in your average Mac OS X dock:


This is what we mean by 'underdesign'. From the left, then: a slice of the iTunes icon, Mac OS X System Preferences, NeoOffice, Firefox, Activity Monitor, PSCS3, Preview; after the division bar: my home directory with custom icon, Applications directory. the PSCS3 icon looks kind of drab (if functional) next to its prettier neighbors. The gradient gives it a certain visual punch–but not much.

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29 December 2006

[pdx] A Photo Fit for a Calendar

702 One of the unexpected bonuses of Amanda Fritz's new blog is that Steve Fritz is a hell of a photographer.

Go off to this post right now. Gorgeous, gorgeous sunrise snap of Portland; like the post title says, fit for a calendar (we thought about hotlinking, but decided against it; from our POV, it's kinda rude. So, go look, then come back).

That photo jogged our memories. One of our favorite things in the world is a collection of Portland maps going back to about 1927. Several gas station maps in this batch, and Steve's creative process on this photo seems to be channelling the artist of the cover illo of the Chevron/Gousha 1965 Portland map, which can be seen right of this very paragraph (click to enbiggen).

But you be the judge. Below find a comp we assembled using relevant cropped sections of each bit of art. The chief difference is that Steve's photo was taken at sunrise whilst the painting is purported to be of Portland 1965 at sunset. Other than that, of course, is the obvious difference in urban artifice and architecture; but my verbiage veers most verbose, so on to the photo (the painting is on the left, Steve's photo is on the right, naturlich):


Miles, John, you have competition I do believe.

(Parenthetically, checking in at Stumptown Confidential linked me to this requiem for the once-great, now-lamented main street of Thomason USA, McLoughlin Boulevard–recently published in the Oregonian's Metro South supplement)

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28 December 2006

[pdx] One Bandwagon I Don't Mind Jumping On


701 Amanda Fritz's New Blog.

I voted for her. I liked the way she ran her campaign, I liked the way she was straight up with us voters. I liked someone who was truly grass roots and not astro-turf. I liked the way she took VOE and showed us all how to do it was supposed to be done.

I liked the way she came to it as a calling, not a crass or cynical way to acquire power. Believing in a candidate may sound corny, even in these post-post-irony times, but she actually stirred that feeling in me.

Everything Emilie Boyles was, she wasn't, and you know that's a good thing.

Frankly, I hope she tries again. I'd vote for her again.

In the meantime, I link. And sometimes, I even comment.

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[design] A New Typographic Text

700 Over at Designorati:Typography I've reviewed a newly released book (it's been out about a month) which is another addition to the range of various typographic instructional textbooks that are available for students of type these days.

Amongst them are A Typographic Workbook, which was my text back in my PCC days and has gone into a new edition. These books are cool books to have on one's shelf. Each one seems to hit the same "stations of the cross": history, development, how type works, what it's made of, the era of hot metal type, Gutenberg, and modern digital type development (I'm convinced that the name Zuzana Licko will rank up there with Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, but that's a personal thing, and yet another digression), but each one treats the subject with a little different tone and insight.

Since you always remember your first, ATW will always hold a sweet spot in my heart. But the review I did on D:Typo was for a recent drop by Wiley and Company called Typographic Design: Form and Communication, 4th Edition. It touts itself on the cover as one of the standard texts and references for students and professionals over the last 20 years; in as much as I haven't been in design for 20 years, I'll have to concede the point. However, IMHO, if you have the name of the late Philip Meggs on your cover, your bar is automatically set higher.

If you don't know The Book, you don't know the history of Design. Anyway!

It's my pleasure to report that, as per my review, the book does indeed live up to its billing. It's got a color-splashy, grid-honoring approach that is accessible and comfortable; even though it's a college-level text any typophile will love this book.

I think people should buy one.

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27 December 2006

[transit] A Tri-Met Open House

699 Tri-Met's a-having an open house...and everyone is invited, of course.

It's at Pioneer Courthouse Square, Thursday, 4 Jan 2007.

Here's the sordid details.

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[bits] The New Blogger, or Another Unnecessary Reminder That I'm Not Cool

698 It's frustrating to wait on some things.

For months on months now, it seems, I've been hearing about the run up to The New Blogger. I've been waiting very patiently to go on over because, well, I looked at it when it was called Blogger in Beta, and we have found it to be nice indeed. I want to convert when I can.

It's turning out to be a very discouraging wait.

Some people have been seeing the migration invitation coming and going on their dashboard. I am not one of those.

It's remarkably hard to find an unambiguous, helpful answer to this. There are some people migrating and blogging their experience but they are more than the usual end-user and tend to communicate in an ethereal language I have a little trouble following. And the Blogger help page you're directed to if you try to initiate the switch is singularly unhelpful.

Notably, I've been hearing rumors of migration problems. Some blogs taking over a day to migrate over, particularly. A poster to the "Beta No More!" topic in the "How Do I?" section of the Google Groups Blogger Help Group (Google signin required if you want to participate) just now complained that even though their Blogger blog has less than 300 posts it's still migrating over after 4 hours' wait.

So, maybe even though I really want to use the New Blogger maybe it's just as well I've not been invited yet.

I'm a big fan of Blogger; it's made having a blog a real no-brainer. But the old-to-new migration? Definitely thumbs-down on that. Lots of complaints and no real help or answers. I was figuring they could pull it off a little better than that.

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25 December 2006

[bits] NeoOffice; A Gift for Mac Users

697 I've long been a supporter of OpenOffice.org, the FOSS replacement for MSOffice. It works, it allows you to edit Word files, and its free.

OO.o, however, is not a native OS X app; it requires the X Window system to run. If you install Mac OS X, X won't be there without you having to go through an extra step, and if you're a Tiger, that means getting the OS install disk back out and installing X Windows from that, which is a bit of a hassle, truly. Since I've been playing installation games lately, I've adopted a "once installed, leave it the hell alone" philosophy.

Another drawback is that the fonts the X Window system uses are not the fonts that the rest of OS X uses, and if you want to use your own font library, you have to convert them with a command line utility. CLI has never scared me, but it's a pain to do and you really begin to see the point of those people who complained about it for so many years. But, in the end, it is worth it. After all, where else are you going to get MSOffice functionality (and that means spreadsheet, slideshow, word processor, basic drawing, and database) for free?

But let's be honest; you have little or no hackerly mojo or, like me, easily frayed patience. What to do then?

I give you NeoOffice.

NeoOffice is OS X-alicious. It uses your current printer. It uses your current fonts. It's free. It has an Aqua interface now. And, even though it's beta, like any good OS X app, it just works. My current tech editing project, of course, depends on being able to process Word files, and TextEdit and TextWrangler are wicked useful but they aren't full WP's. NeoOffice Write, OTOH, is.

Go to the NeoOffice site, download the app and the patch, and ditch MS Office, if you are so inclined.

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24 December 2006

[design] Big Doings in Adobeville

696 By now, if you're so inclined to keep track of such things, you'll have heard that Adobe has made the beta of the next generation of Photoshop, Photoshop CS3 (version 10), a public thing.

That means that anyone can download it and anyone can run it, and almost anyone can run it beyond a two-day's grace period. You are elevated to the select if you own Adobe software already, according to this verbiage at the PSCS3 Adobe Labs download site:

The Photoshop CS3 beta is available in English only but to Photoshop CS2 users worldwide. It is available to licensed users of either the Photoshop CS2 (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Creative Suite 2 Standard or Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Production Studio Standard and Premium (full, upgrade, and education), Adobe Video Bundle (full, upgrade, and education) or Adobe Web Bundle (full, upgrade, and education).
Instructions are available at the site on how to get a license beyond the two day's grace. It's Universtal Binary, which means it will run on PowerMac, MacIntels, and WinXP and WinVista.

Go to the site if you're interested
.

Meanwhile, in the Adobeville suburb of IconDesignerTown, big changes are afoot for the look of the various Adobe (and now Macromedia) brands. The first changes were wildly noticed by the early downloaders with the splash screen of the PSCS3 beta, which can be seen by following this link to James Duncan Davidson's blog. Go there, look, and come back.

So, what'd'ja think? Didn't see that one coming, didja? Neither did we.

The next exhibit can be seen in miniature left and in large scale (and annotated) at Veerle's Flickr here. This is the new range and the new look of Adobe's application icons. No more are the shell, the butterfly, the feather, and the flower to grace your Dock (or your Quick Launch bar for you Wintellers). Now it's just gradated color and two letters. As a matter of fact, some commenters I've read are calling them "Medeleevan" after the style which seems to suggest blocks on the Periodic Table.

Also read Veerle's blog here, where she explores the new icon look, snags an interview with an Adobean, and fields some insipired commentary.

My first reaction on looking at the new icons was that of disappointment, and I still am. I had grown to be rather affectonate toward the icons with the natural look, even if there was no real way to connect the image to the app; it was a one-to-one mapping which set up rather quickly, actually; if you want to use InDesign, click on the butterfly.

I was particularly fond of the butterfly, and thought the InDesign 2 version was best of all. But things change.

I suppose the new icons will grow on me, even if they seem underdesigned in the extreme. And I'm sure they'll field thier share of insults as well as plaudits–some commenters feel the underdesign is a good thing.

But I'll miss those friendly little icons.

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15 December 2006

[tech, design] My Duplo Hard Drive

695 Having been made abundantly clear to me by time and events lately that a second hard drive is an Extremely Good Thing™, we went a-searching.

The usefulness of having a second hard drive of course goes way beyond at last having enough room to store all the music I own and not having to fret about free space (though it also must be mentioned that I think, on my original 80GB startup disk, having a mere 50GB free is just too damn full. And, it took me the better part of three years to fill it that full. Anyway.). Also, as time and events have taught, the processor might make the computer, but the hard-drive is what makes it your computer. It's the heart and soul, or maybe the fuel tank; you can have the hottest hemi on the block, but if you have a tiny gas tank, you ain't going far, friend.

It should go without staying, but I will; it's nice to have two Startup Disks. The facility of this was more than demonstrated by annihilating my OS X system folder and having to erase and reinstall, as per our last odyssey of chasing down the kernel panic on my no-good, very-bad, really-horrible day.

Another thing I didn't count on was in beta-testing some software (no, I'm not going to say what it is; they make you sign agreements for that). In this case, the beta release ought not to be used on your current installation, because it will very probably overwrite some common files on the startup drive, not only rendering your current production software inoperable but maybe even preventing its future re-installation.

And uninstalling some stuff to install some other stuff just to reinstall the prior stuff later on is a stone-freaking-pain.

The indicated solution? A second hard drive, of course. FireWire, I was thinking. Now, I hadn't shopped for equipment in a while, but I went a-looking; I knew the name LaCie from one of my other day jobs. They make a nice silver desktop FW drive that is a workhorse and kicks data in a major way. They were the first place I seriously checked, and the place I bought from. Little did I know how little extra storage costs.

I give you the LaCie Brick, a mobile FW hard drive. Starting at 40GB (we have the 60GB model), they look just like Duplo blocks. The whimsical packaging allows for handy stacking quite obviously, and the model we have, 60 gig, cost only about $100. This has my beta software on it at current and has OS X installed, so it's an external boot disk as well–which will be much, much better than booting from the DVD, which must take at least 5 minutes (which, when you are restoring your system, is as eternity).

The blue Brick is the 40 gig model; the red Brick is the 80 gig; mine is the white.

Throw into the bargain that LaCie's US home is in Hillsboro, out on NW Evergreen Parkway, meant that three-five day FedEx shipping got here the very next day, which is very good news for some of my workflows. After a current project, it's going to be devoted to backups and picture and music storage amongst other things.

And, while we're at it, add my voice to the chorus of those who sing the predictable refrain from memory; back up your data. Partial, full, however you can.

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06 December 2006

[pdx] Contemplating The Couplet

694 I read the balloon being floated about the westside Burnside-Couch couplet with a bit of personal bemusement.

When I was in high school, a spokesman from ODOT came to class–I think it was driver's ed–to talk about traffic laws and why streets were made the way they were, and up until then I didn't really 'get' one-way streets. I was stuck on the observation that not being able to go back down the street you just came up seems limiting.

The ODOT speaker put it very well–the one way street carries more traffic in one direction than a two-way street does. It was so obvious, I was missing it.

So, if we divide Burnside into a couplet running in twain with Couch, that should relieve crowding on Burnside, right?

I don't know. Each side of Burnside carries three lanes in each direction. Couch isn't that wide; I don't think that Couch could practically carry three lanes of traffic. So you haven't increased traffic carrying capacity at all; you've just moved it off to another street.

And is it just me, or is the thought of having to bust an S-curve up one block of NW 2nd Avenue and down one block of NW 19th Avenue seem just a little iffy?

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03 December 2006

[tech] The PHP 5, Didn't Follow All The Instructions (Even Though I Thought I Did), OS Reinstallation Blues (Complete with Off-The-Cuff FAQ)

A while back, it will be recalled, I flirted with the idea of upgrading the native PHP on my Macintosh (that version being PHP 4.4.1), wanting to self-teach me some MySQL and reasoning that in order to have all the tools, I ought to have both of the most current versions.

I did try installing PHP 5, but omitted an important step, thus b0orkingating my Apache installation. No problem, said I to myself, said I, so I tried reinstalling OS X Tiger over my extant (and now flawed) installation.

The result is funny–provided it hasn't happened to you.

Herewith, a cautionary tale.

The First Signs Of a Problem

It may (or may not) also be recalled that I was chasing down a kernel panic problem I've had since installing Le Tigre. The thing would KP on wakeup. I was hoping to kill two birs with one stone.

For some reason which will never be within the ken of man, the OS reinstall hung in the middle of installing one of the sets of language files (ironically, it wouldn't finish Finnish). after waiting twenty minutes for it to complete the last 2% of installation, I tried rebooting the system.

Bad move. I was introduced to the feeling a Mac user gets when they reboot and find that instead of the calming screen with the Apple logo and the rotating throbber, you get a low-rez rectangle in the middle of the screen with a file folder straight out of OS 9, with alternating Finder logo and question mark.

Sighted system folder, sank same.

Strangely, this was not the depths of my despair. But I get ahead of myself.

OS Rehab

The next natural step was to boot from the optical drive. I hate booting from a CD or DVD; it takes so damn long. But it had to be done, so it was done. Nothing seemed to be physically damaged, so it was on to reinstalling the OS.

I decided to start by reinstalling OS 10.3 Panther. That went without too much hassle, and I even found that our old stuff was in the Previous Systems folders; I "root"ed them out and reattached them. My creative apps didn't reactivate then; I contemplated communicating with Quark and Adobe (amongst others). But Panther was up and stable, and so I forged ahead into Tiger

Tiger reinstalled fine (with a bit of nailbiting as we paused to watch it install the Finnish language files). Once in Tiger, the creative apps reactivated flawlessly, a beam of light in the darkness. Aside from anomalous behavior with Spotlight (which passed and did not recur) the system seemed to be stable, but, soon enough, the kernel panics recurred–and I was still at PHP 4.4.1. What to do?

This Is The Wrong Tool, Gromit–And It's Gone Wrong!

When I aquired SunDial Three, I managed to also obtain AppleCare (a $249 security blanket, but that $249 buys a lot of peace, let me tell you). Cared-for Applers know that the AppleCare box comes with a CD-ROM that includes TechTool Deluxe. Now, my AppleCare expired about six months back, but I still have the TechTool CD. In it goes.

Copying the app to the hard drive it tells me I need to update it to work with Tiger, and I do this. Everything checks out over multiple runs...except something called the volume structure. But I can't repair the volume if I booted from the startup disk so, of course, I boot from the CD-ROM.

TTD running from CD-ROM (remember, this is the version Tiger isn't supposed to be compatible with) reported volume structure errors, so, with the confidence of someone who trusts authority sometimes way too much, I forge ahead and let TTD go to work on the disk. Almost six torturous hours later (who knew it would take so damned long?) the disk repair is complete.

Did I fix it?

Oy. Did I ever fix it.

Houston, We Have Screwed The Pooch

Several grafs back, I menched how I had though I had committed the worst OS transgression ever. Had I but known.

TTD in the version I had it is, as said, incompatible with Tiger. It identifies natural OS tendencies as problems. Fix those problems, and you irrevocably break the OS.

How bad?

Well, the first sign of trouble was when the kernel panic occurred within seconds of powering-on. At least, however, this saves time when waiting for the next KP.

The next sign of problem is when you boot from the Tiger DVD and find that Disk Utility can't. Repair of the volume is impossible because of something called a corrupted B-Tree node. The volume can't even be mounted.

The final sign of hard drive Gehenna is trying to reload (once again) the OS, and finding that the Installer can't find the hard drive at all.

Yes, my friends, logically speaking, I nuked the hard drive. There may or may not have been files still there, but as far as my instrumentality was concerned, the file system was as dead as the President's concern for the poor. It was thus that, with a heavy heart, I proceeded to erase and repartition the drive, taking with it things I collected over three and a half years of use; some of it not replaceable, a lot of it uncritical, and waving a fond goodby to some apps (Internet Reconnector and Speed Download) at least for now.

Now, your saying to yourself (If you've hung on this long), hey, Sam, surely you printed off some of that reg info to refeed in case of this? To which I'd answer, are you kidding? Who does that sort of backups? Haw haw! And when you're through laughing, let me tell you about my investment plan (hint-two words: Oregon Lottery).

The State of The System

The system is back up and running and seems stable. I have had a couple of kernel panics but instead of waking from sleep they happened when I was opening a couple of apps (Real player and iTunes).

As it turned out, iPhoto (I was still using version 2) is gone too. It came bundled with my Mac when I bought it; I may dig back into the original CDs and see if maybe the package is hidden away there somewhere. I have also lost Internet Reconnector and Speed Download 3, but replacing those is irritating and maybe will have a nominal cost. All my iTunes purchaes music is gone.

If the kernel panics continue, I'll contact Crucial about that 512M memory stick I bought from them and see if they'll work with me on it.

And now, the promised FAQ

I thought I'd known enough about Unices to install PHP 5 and fix it if it went wrong, but only proved the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Once the system was up and running, I looked at the instruction on Marc Liyanage's PHP for Mac OS page and followed them a little more closely this time.

If you're a relative Unix tyro, there are some things you should do to kick PHP 5 on your Macintosh. The following are notional FAQs that should steer you around the shoals (the Q's I FA'd myself weren't this but more along the lines of why me, God, why me? But, as usual, I digress). So now, without further ado, I give you:

Samuel John Klein's Quick, Off-The-Cuff Guide and FAQ to Installing PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.4, Without Nuking Your OS

  • Mac OS X 10.4 comes with PHP version 4.4.1. The currently available version is 5.2.x. You will probably want to upgrade if you want to use things such as MySQL5; it will work with PHP 4, but you won't have access to some of the more recent MySQL tools, we are told.
  • The first step in upgrading is to obtain the current package. Marc Liyanage's highly informative PHP for Mac OS X page has linkages to PHP 5 for Mac that will run not only under Apache 1.3 (the default for Mac OS X) but also for Apache 2 (if you really want to punish yourself and install that). Go to Marc's page here. This package is a complete installation; if you just want to run PHP in a default-for-Mac-OS style, this installer will install a working PHP 5 setup on your Mac with no recompiling. Nifty.
Now that you have the binary downloaded, become aware of what your system is already running. If you already have PHP 4 working on your Mac, you'll know it–it requires you to go sudo-jitsu and edit the file /etc/httpd/httpd.conf. Uncommenting the following lines:
#LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
#AddModule mod_php4.c
And then restarting Personal Web Sharing (System Preferences>Sharing) will cause PHP 4 to wake up on your system.

PHP5 Installation Concerns

As I've said, if you've done this, you'll know; if you haven't done this, PHP is still inactive on your system, and you can proceed to install. If, however, you really, really want to be sure, use TextEdit or a plain text editor (not a word processor) to create the following file:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
call it "test.php" and drop it into the Sites folder in your account's home folder. This is where Apache looks for your own local web pages. Then, copy the following line:
http://127.0.0.1/~yourname/test.php
paste it into your web browser's address box, replace "yourname" with your "short" user name (the name of your home folder) and hit return. If PHP is enabled, a bunch of tables will display with PHP Information. If it isn't, your browser will just display the unadorned PHP code. Also, do not simply drag the file into the browser; your browser has to request it from the web server who passes the code through PHP.

If You Do Have PHP 4 Enabled, then, it is imperative that you recomment the two lines in the httpd.conf file that enabled PHP to begin with before installing PHP 5. Go back there, now, and put the pound signs back in. Don't argue. Just do it. There are ways to run both PHP 4 and PHP 5, and you're welcome to learn them, but learn them first. I only need, at this self-learning time, to run one. Edit the httpd.conf file, restart Personal Web Sharing, and proceed to install.

If you were foolish enough to install PHP 5 without recommenting the crucial lines, you now have a problem. Apache isn't sure what PHP you want to use, and so Personal Web Sharing will not work at all. Marc Liyanage saith "bad things will happen"; from my POV, it looked like I broke my web server. There may well have been a way to come back from that, but my bull-in-a-china-shop approach rendered any other attempt at repair academic.

So please, as God is my witness, and by all that is holy, learn from my bad example, please?

Installing PHP 5

Hopefully we're at the point where we have cut PHP 4 out of the loop. You've made sure your httpd.conf file is correctly commented out and you've restarted Personal Web Sharing. Here's what you do next:
  • Unarchive the PHP tar.gz file. Use BOMArchive Helper (says Marc), not Stuffit Expander. To make sure you're using BOMArchive Helper, do a Get Info on the file, mouse over "Open With", and select it from the flyout menu.
  • Mount the disk image
  • Double-click on the package file.
  • Let 'er rip
The package will install itself to /usr/local/php5. All PHP 5 files will now be there, and a symbolic link from /etc/httpd will cause Apache to wake up PHP 5 instead of 4 (the new installation has its own configuration file that will do the job; there should be no need to do anymore configuration-jitsu.

Now, stop and restart Personal Web Sharing; and take this line:
http://127.0.0.1/~yourname/test.php
and enter it into your web browser and, assuming you've placed the test.php file there, a display should obtain telling you more than you ever wanted to know about your new PHP 5 installation.

Marc Liyanage's pages at Entropy.ch are a good place to go for troubleshooting info. The above was my whole experience. If you have any troubleshooting questions, go to the PHPBB discussion forums there, register, and post away.

Good luck. And don't be too intimidated; if you do the above, you should have the most recent PHP on your system with no problems.

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