I occasionally get asked about Space Trader, a great game for the Palm originally by Pieter Spronck. Several years ago, I helped him write some of the code that was released as version 1.2, way way back in October of 2002.

Evidently, version 1.2 doesn’t run on the Treo 650. I don’t even have a Palm development environment at the moment, so I haven’t had a chance to fix the code that crashes it. But never fear! It’s Open Source, and someone going by the name of DrWowe fixed it. In addition, it looks like Pieter has fixed a few outstanding bugs (that all look like they were in code I wrote… how embarrassing).

Read all about it at:

http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=55952
http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/p.spronck/picoverse/spacetrader/STDownload.html

There have been other articles on this, but I wanted to post my own approach, just because it’s such an ugly — yet effective — hack.

I wanted PHP 4 and PHP 5 to both live happily on my Windows 2k machine, and work under Apache 1.3x. Install them in c:\php4 and c:\php5, and there you go. It’s easy to create an httpd.conf that takes a define, and figures out which PHP to load based upon that define.

But then both PHPs want to use the same php.ini file, specifically, c:\WINNT\php.ini. This is only a problem when you’re using PHP extensions, because one version will try to load the wrong ones. There are registry tricks, supposedly, and environment variable tricks to get different .ini files going, depending on version. None of ’em worked for me.

So I opened up vim, and edited my php4ts.dll, and replaced the “php.ini” string with “ph4.ini”. Now I happily have two PHP installs, each with its own .ini file, and everything is copacetic — except for all that software that breaks the newly enforced reference rules. But that’s another story.

So, while the core development of CMS Made Simple is undergoing some interesting (and pervasive) updates as we head towards a 1.0 release, I’ve been fixing modules to work correctly under PHP 4.4 and 5.0.5. Obviously, my understanding of references was weak, and I’m paying the price now. Damn, I wrote a lot of wrong code.

But now I’m playing with making an alternate Admin interface for CMS Made Simple using some of the fine AJAX and Javascript libraries out there.

I’m using xajax to marshall up objects and submit them nicely to PHP, and I’m using the script.aculo.us Web 2.0 and its underlying Prototype library for User Interface and special effects.

Some of it’s silly, like making the login box shake if you incorrectly enter your username or password (imitating Mac OS X login). But some of it is really slick — adding users to groups is now as simple as dragging’n’dropping items between lists. It could use a way of multi-selecting that worked with dragging, but an “add all” and “remove all” button mitigate that somewhat. Of course, the original interface will remain for non-Javascript users or people who prefer it.

I plan to do the same for assigning permissions to users. But the real challenge will be drag’n’drop content reordering. This will require a draggable tree. I haven’t yet found code to make this easy; even with all these great libraries, I have to be careful to select features that work equally well under the Evil of Internet Explorer, as well as Gecko-based browsers and Opera…

I’m trying to track down a bug in my CMS Made Simple PHP code where I did something stupid with references (a rant on the PHP pass-by-value model available upon request). So it only manifests with PHP 4.4.x or PHP 5.0.5, since that’s where they finally decided to get strict with us idiot slackers. Neither of these are available as binary packages on Mac OS 10.4.

I was dismayed, shocked, stunned, dazed, and confused to learn that PHP was no longer a package for Fink. Dammit! Now I have to figure it out for myself. Crap.

With the help of a variety of pages out there on the web (especially this one), I was able to do it. Here’s how:

Install Fink, if you haven’t already. I use the “unstable” packages. Read the FAQ, and muck around with it for a while until you feel ready to proceed.

Install a wholehellovalotta packages using Fink:

• libjpeg
• libtiff
• libpng
• libxml2

I also installed the Fink version of MySQL server 4.1, client, and a bunch of shared libraries.

Next, gotta build ZLib:
curl -O ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/libpng/png/src/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
cd zlib-1.2.3
./configure --prefix=/sw
make
(su if necessary)
make install


(I did my install work in /sw/src, but you could do it somewhere else if it pleases you more. Just take note of this other location when you need it later.)

Finally, we get PHP 5 .0.5 from http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.0.5.tar.gz/from/a/mirror

tar xzvf php-5.0.5.tar.gz
cd php-5.0.5
./configure --with-libjpeg=/sw --with-libtiff=/sw --with-libpng=/sw \
--with-gd --with-mysql=/sw --with-xml --with-apxs --with-exif \
--with-jpeg-dir=/sw --enable-exif --with-png-dir=/sw --with-zlib-dir=/sw \
--enable-embedded-mysqli
make
(su if necessary)
make install


Now, I already had a version of PHP installed before this, provided by Marc Liyanage’s excellent binary packages available at his page, so I didn’t need to tweak my php.ini file. If you do, you’d probably do something like:

cp /sw/src/php-5.0.5/php.ini-recommended /usr/local/lib/php.ini

and then edit into submission. You can also use the more general php.ini-dist instead of php.ini-recommended. I don’t know why they provide both — probably to confuse idiots like me. You’ll also need to register the PHP Mime Type with Apache. Edit your /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file, and add either to the general area or to a specific virtual host the line:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php


Now test it! Create a test file in your web root containing:

<php phpinfo();>

and browse on over to it. With any luck, you’ll be greeted with ahappy PHP 5.0.5 banner.
Celebrate this with red wine. Preferably good red wine. Then get back to coding. As should be obvious, I decided to document instead of code, but I didn’t skip that vital red wine step.

Enjoy!

Since I have this unreasonable need to keep all of my digital photos on the Powerbook, I’m running out of disk space. Gee, you’d think 60GB would be enough for just about anything. But with 30GB of graphics files (21GB of which is just photographs), space gets used up quickly.

The eventual plan is to use iView MediaPro2 for keeping the pictures organized, Photoshop for manipulating them in any way necessary, and come up with some bridge to Gallery2 for publishing collections on the web. We’ll see.

In any case, the problem arises of disks. The one I’m currently considering is the Seagate Momentus 5400.2. I like that Seagate still has a five year warranty. The drive’s 100GB, which would give me another 40GB. That’s about 15 overseas trips worth of pictures, or, if I’m lucky, enough to tide me over until I get my Super New Intel Mac Notebook with its 250GB hard drive in Spring of ’07.

Update: Somehow, I’d missed the ST9120821A. That’s 120GB! Wheeeeee!