Ya down with PHP? Yeah you know me!

So my company also operates another related site that required a little love. It's written in php. We had to make some changes to make a client happy. I volunteered, as I thought it might be nice to learn php. After some initial trepidation, I dove in and got the application running. Getting the LAMP stack running on Mac is kind of annoying - minor weirdness with different packages and odd compatibility issues - that kind of crap doesn't exist on linux - in Ubuntu the work is accomplished by doing this:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql libapache-2-mod-php5 mysql-server

And BAM! It works. How easy is that! Man I love Ubuntu. I should get a t-shirt that says that or something.

ANYWAY, back to the point of the post - I had a hard time getting the LAMP stack running, but I finally got it going. I got the application I needed to work with up and running in no time once the servers were setup, but we hit a snag. Some of the work I am doing requires SSL. SSL is a pain in the ass. I could not, for the life of me get it setup. Missing .so files in mac, weirdness once I found them, compilation errors, how many times must I run make and make install? This sucked, until I found this awesome MAMP program, that bundles php5, apache2, and mysql into one Mac application. This had some promise. It installed just like a regular app, and provided a GUI interface for the most common apache setup stuff, like document root. Did I mention IT'S FREE. Who are these awesome nerds that do these incredible things for us? Once I discovered this awesome tool, I was able to follow simple directions on how to setup SSL, create a bogus self-signed certificate, and holy crap, it just worked!

Since then, I have been diving right into the craziness that is php. Little intricacies like php pages that have html forms that submit back to the same php! Odd. Symbols like -> and => where there should be dots. Some things are similar. Braces. Semicolons at line endings. All in all, I found php to be a pretty simple language. I can't say I understand it fully or anything, but I am certainly able to poke around this application and make things work. I LOVE arrays that are really just like maps, or can be just like arrays. I love the convenience methods like print_r to print out all the contents of an array. Now as someone who has done almost all my programming in java, and especially in java web applications, here's the kicker. I would make a change, then refresh the page, and the change was already there. Yep. Pretty awesome. No build.xml that then deploys to the server that you then restart, then re-login to your application to see what the change did. No sir. So my lack of php skill didn't put too much of a dent in productivity. That's awesome.

I am now truly excited to rock out with Groovy or Scala or one of these other JVM-based scripting languages, so that I can get the best of both worlds. Things are going to get interesting! Man I am a horrendous nerd.

MacBookPro.Sweetsauce.Awesome.Computer.com

So. It happened. I got a MacBook Pro. Here at Sportsvite, the entire engineering team (yes all three of us) has Macbook Pros. Out of sheer computer envy, I kept watching my compadres on their fancy computers and thinking to myself "Man, I sure would be more productive if I had one of those." I think that in the back of my mind I knew that was BS, and I just wanted to have the same computer as them. I am here to say that I was right, and wrong.

What's Awesome

Old Computer (Core 2 Duo 1.66Mhz, Vista Home Premium) JBoss Startup: 90s
New Computer( Core 2 Duo 2.2Mhz, OS X Leopard) JBoss Startup: 16s
Old Computer Screen: 14in, 1200x800
New Computer Screen: 15in, 1440x900
Old Computer Startup: 2-3 min
New Computer Startup: 30-60 sec

The incredibly crisp seamless performance.

This whole .dmg file, where you open it and drop it into the Applications directory and it just works? Not bad!

The giant crisp display.

The smooth, quiet keyboard.

The dock. Nice.

The non-ridiculous power cord, and the magnetic connection to the computer that it uses.

Garageband. I have no clue how it works, but it will be a part of my guitar practice sessions for a while, until I do.

Adium. The little green duck is hilarious, and it seems be a really awesome simple chat tool.

What's Not So Awesome

Well for starters, where the hell is the right mouse button? I don't know, but I wish I could find it. Don't tell me to hit apple either every time I click. That's LAME.COM. But, I can look past this - I am sure all those devoted Mac snobs out there must look at it as a sign of their greater purpose and ability. I think it's kinda lame, but I am okay with it. Fortunately, there are USB ports, into which you can plug nice mice with all the buttons. Problem solved!

Installing Apache http server. This one was a tough one. This really sucked. A lot. Like on the suckiness scale, this one had to be about a 30 out of 10. Fortunately, my friend Bob showed me DarwinPorts, which seems to be awesome. They have all these ready made packages, and you just type things like port install apache2. True to its name, it does just that! Huzzah! By the way, I also hate mod_jk2, but oh well. It all works now.

Sudo. The idea of sudo sucks. I will have to get around to do setting it up so everything is done as root like I do on my linux box at home. Sudo is lame. Sudo just means you have to type a four-letter word before you do something catastrophically stupid. I don't like Sudo.

The apparently lack of the start menu like in Windows. I don't really like that either. I know I can use finder to get to Applications, but it's just not the same as being able to just get there from my screen. Again, likely something I'll figure out.

The fact that JDK6 isn't ready yet. Come on guys! Good thing I am not doing performance engineering anymore, since all those sweet tools like jmap, jhat, jstack, and jconsole were greatly improved in JDK6.

No pgUp or pgDn by themselves. Also no home or end. This is one place where my Toshiba really shines - it's got a great and friendly keyboard.

Replacing 'control' with this 'Apple' key, but not having it in the same place as 'Control' - that sucks. maybe there is some way to reroute the keyboard. I can see this causing so many problems.

More to come later