Category: confessions of a pixel pusher
In order to get Apache running with suexec under OS X 10.4.11 and also have php you will need to do the following:
1) get the apache sources. (1.3.39)
2) get the php4 sources (php-4.4.8)
3) extract in the same directory and go into the php one to run:
./configure --prefix=/usr \
--sysconfdir=/etc \
--localstatedir=/var \
--mandir=/usr/share/man \
--with-xml \
--with-apache=../apache1.3.39
make
sudo make install
4) then go into the apache folder and
./configure --with-layout=Darwin \
--enable-module=most \
--enable-shared=max \
--enable-suexec \
--suexec-caller=www \
--suexec-docroot=/Library/WebServer/Documents \
--activate-module=src/modules/php4/libphp4.a \
--suexec-userdir=Sites
make -j2
sudo make install
5) I had to change /etc/httpd/htddp.conf like:
comment out modules in httpd.conf
#LoadModule userdir_module libexec/httpd/mod_userdir.so
#LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
#LoadModule hfs_apple_module libexec/httpd/mod_hfs_apple.so
#LoadModule bonjour_module libexec/httpd/mod_bonjour.so
#AddModule mod_userdir.c
AddModule mod_php4.c
#AddModule mod_hfs_apple.c
#AddModule mod_bonjour.c
Please note that mod_php4 gets added but not loaded. Probably since it got compiled in.
My httpd rejected to start with hfs_apple or bonjour loaded and crashed with userdir.
Since years I work on a couple of computers via command line. Since they are real unix computers it all works remarkably well. For a specific solution I need to run osacompile. AppleScript needs to get compiled. I did not find a way to distribute it as text. So finally I got a hold of an OS X machine in the internet. More on that part later. osacompile really wants to run the application that it will talk to later. Also rather odd. But, hey, we talk Apple here. A sect in disguise of a technology company. So everything is possible. Or rather impossible. Like adding a development environment. The Box happened to have no Dev Tools installed. Usually that’s maybe a bit timely but overall straight forward. Installing development tools on a unix computer.
With Apple OS X 10.4.11 it turns out that doing so via ssh is not as trivial. You can download the source code. But first you need to create a developer account with ADC. It’s free. It’s annoying. They keep forgetting my password. Once you logged in,
you could download the dmg file to your local machine. I could have done that and waited only a couple of weeks for my DSL to upload the 900+ MB file to the final server I need it on. Downloading the dmg directly did not work. I had to fake a login. Which is easier as it seems. In the browser that is logged in (firefox I assume) you look for a cookie called ADCDownloadAuth. This you copy paste into the following command line:
curl -b "ADCDownloadAuth=SomeVeryLongCookieString" -O \
http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/xcode_2.5_developer_tools/xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg
At least that’s the valid file of today.
Once you have the file you attach (aka mount) it via:
hdiutil attach xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg
and navigate into
/Volumes/Xcode Tools/Packages
to then run:
sudo installer -verbose -pkg XcodeTools.mpkg -target /
Don’t run this against XcodeTools.mpkg in /Volumes/Xcode Tools directly. This results in the error message:
2008-01-09 03:47:43.889 installer[2843] IFPkg::_parseOldStyleForLanguage - can't find .info file (XcodeTools)
which does not google very sucessful.
The install seems to work, from what I can tell so far. I have gcc and make. And that’s all I cared for.
post format war
It is hard to imagine that HD DVD would come back from the blow that Warners BluRay decision delivered. The internet was busy speculating about half a billion dollars in bribes that supposedly that came down rolling Barham Blvd. I think that the sales performance of DVD makes the Studios very nervous. All too quickly they got used to the huge volume of DVD revenue and a steady increase for that matter. The average american bought DVDs for $53, rented them for $25 in 2007. And he/she paid $32 at the Cinema Box office. For both HD formats combined a single dollar left peoples purses in the last year.
In total billions these numbers look like:
16 DVD sales
7.5 DVD rentals
0.3 nextgen DVD formats (both)
9.6 Box office
The troubling point for the studios seems to be that DVD sales are declining. Already in 2005 DVD set top box sales had gone done for the first time in history. Back then it probably was the fanfare about the ‘next thing’. People don’t like to buy yesterdays gadget. The studios felt they needed to get HD via DVD going. And Sony did the better show and number exercises.
Both formats encoding technology, bandwidth and other core parameters are pretty similar. As Mike Curis eludes to, the scripting technology in HD DVD seems to be more open, developer friendly and thefor hugely favorable over the bloated Java based BluRay implementation. But what’s to expect from Sony.
Flat panel displays sales have taken off, and about a year analog TV will be turned off. With the format war being over the Bluray sales should surge. And, I think, they will. Initially. Many bluray players will be PS3s. After correcting the outrageous price Sony’s next gen box had finally some sales worth mentioning. How many people bought the black box because they could not get the cute white one is a different story.
I wouldn’t be surprised if DVD+BluRay Sales volumes would come out flat in 2008 and from there on further decline. There are three reasons for this future disappointment:
* It’s the internet stupid.
Not only the net alone. Technology progresses everywhere. Hell, my toaster wants more attention than it’s great grandfather did 20 years ago. Media is omnipresent. VHS had to compete with, well, Books and TV. Maybe radio, cinema and newspapers. That’s about it. Bluray faces a vastly different world. None of the existing media emanations will just fade away. And new ones get created with an increasing pace. There is simply not enough time to watch all those movies.
* we don’t care since you don’t care
The Studios have failed to understand their own product. There is a history to this. And others failed similarly: The music industry would be in much better shape, would they have not confused the means of peddling circular things with the end of enabling people to enjoy music. Both HD formats allow for better visible quality compared to DVD. Better bandwidth and modern codecs could make for a great experience. Despite this potential most early Discs that were available have been widely criticized for their poor transfers. Some people felt that they would be better off with a decent upscale of a good quality DVD. People love movies. A considerable slice of the population, and almost certainly the majority of early (media) tech adopters care for a good experience. The Studios should have put the utmost emphasis on quality. And that starts with the film transfer. Even though the studios are not keen to involve creative people more than absolutely necessary, they should have gotten them on board for the launch of the new media. Imagine Steven Spielberg approving a 5 movie disk set claiming “this is how I want my movies to be seen”. People would spend allot of money for this. They would get players, lay cable. The whole thing. Maybe the studios should have gotten together with the ACE and directors guild to develop a approval system. Pay directors and DPs to sign off on a DVD transfer. I would pay happily knowing that the creative vision was intact. OK, in some cases I would simply paying for the drug habit of that one hit wonder boy. But I do that anyway, one way or another.
* it’s complicated
HDMI 1.3 is really exciting, since it not only features greater than bitdepths but also could carry the extended xvYCC color space. While being true, not many people know what this means. And neither should they. DVD succeeded because it was ‘as simple as CD’. No more rewind. That made Hollywood billions. Simple is key. The HD formats are not exactly known for simplicity. And the studios are not helping. Neither do the hardware makers. I find my way around these matters. But it’s my job to understand all this. And if it wouldn’t, then I would really watch another movie than to worry about downsampled movies that were escaping DRM through the analog otherwise. Having two formats was of course a big problem. But even with BluRay remaining it’s not as easy as it should be. Different disc sizes. Flat panel resolutions. Frame rates.
Image processing. And an interface written in Java simply scares me: There are just too many ways developers mess up. Hardware makers and studios alike fall in love with features that have nothing to do with their product. Multi Angle was one of these technical possibilities that DVD had. Studios were all excited about it. Since they didn’t understand what their product is: A movie is one view. One perspective. Everything else is a cute vaudeville attraction or plain and simple porn that desperately tries to stand out (no pun intended).
Autodesk aka Discreet Flame Flint Inferno applications run under irix or linux. Which is great. Unfortunately it is a long standing practise of those people in montreal to seperate different versions of their application by giving them a different user. Of course that’s just plain wrong and stupid. But if you pay north of 40,000 US$ for a single software seat you stop making reasonable demands. Discreet / AutoDesk does this since more than 14 years, why should they stop?
A couple of simple commands can fix the biggest issues with this. The first one is that each install creates a new user id. The fix is to edit /etc/passwd and give the new user a common id (100 in this example). We assume it was 101 for the new install. Running the following command as root:
find /usr/discreet/NEWLYINSTALLEDVERSION -user 101 -exec chown 100 {} \;
will fix the permissions.
Another annoyance is that they set the umask in the .cshrc of each login. If you run a couple of versions side by side it’s pretty tedious to fix these flags manually. The following does so for all installed versions.
Under Linux you can use sed for this:
cd /usr/discreet
sed -i.bak.umask "s/umask 002/umask 000/" */.cshrc
For Irix you would need to turn to perl:
cd /usr/discreet
perl -i.bak.umask -p -e "s/umask 002/umask 000/" */.cshrc
This will make the umask wide open for the user running flame or one of the other Discreet products. Some people might like that everybody can now delete
and overwrite files. Others don’t.
Interdubs had an awesome year in 2007. I had a certain expectation where the service should be by now. Development-wise and feature=wise I am behind. I want more features, and I want to write them now. But doing them right does always take more time than I think it would. And, my clients got what they essentially need months ago. Since then new features have been extra and on top of it.
Looking back at 2007 I particularly like the the fact that Interdubs could scale from a few beta clients to more than 20 customers. Many of them with very diverse needs. And all of them seemingly happy: Even though nobody is contractually obliged to continue their subscription each one renewed month by month. People some times wonder why Interdubs is so inexpensive. Specially compared to it’s feature set. I think it makes sense: Having the most awesome feature vs. price ratio means that I don’t have to spend much time to keep my clients happy otherwise. It also helps with marketing: If anybody interested in an online media solution should happen to talk about it to an existing interdubs user I will get a call. And when I get a call it becomes a sale. Sooner or later it does. Always.
2007 was also nice, since I had not to act on my 99.99% uptime or money back promise. By now it would be not so nice, if I can not charge anybody for a full month. Which is the whole point: I believe in Interdubs’ reliability enough to put my money where where my mouth is. Outages might happen in the future. Nothing is perfect. But by giving my clients their money back for a whole month, if Interdubs should be longer unavailable than for 5 minutes I there is at least a plan. If this should ever happen. The looming penalty of a month long ‘invoice outage’ makes it financially viable to upgrade the servers that Interdubs runs on. So that it does not happen in the first place. Or is at least less likely.
2007 I published 590 times code updates to Interdubs. That’s why I don’t like to call things “Versions”. Version 590? Sometimes I just moved a couple of links around, to make a frequently used choice easier to find. A couple of times I replaced or upgraded the entire engine that runs Interdubs. I might have gotten lucky, but at no point did I loose data during those updates. And only about 10 changes were so stupid, that my users demanded a change back or further alteration of what I did. Knowing that I will hear about things going in the wrong direction allows me to suggest things with great liberty. The same concept looks enabling from the other side as well: Interdubs users know that they will be listened to. Sometimes it takes only minutes between a suggestion and the actual feature / change showing up on the site. Actually a great deal of ideas and features that make Interdubs worthwhile are a result of this collaboration.
2007 was a very successful year for Interdubs, so I had to decide what to do for Holiday presents. I decided not to send any at all. Instead I asked my kids to pick a charity. They suggested “Doctors without Borders” which I liked as well. So instead of sending gift baskets around some people got vaccinations that they needed.
Being able to decide on these things what to do is one of the perks of running your own company. Today I found Charity Navigator and realised with great relief that only a very small percentage of the interdubs donation will go to the adminstration.
I am certainly looking forward to move Interdubs forward in 2008.
The Rolling Stone writes about audio technology and music and how things have changed in recent years.
Technology and Art influencing each other is a very interesting topic for me. This article touches on a couple of interesting points. Not more though. Without any respect for the matter it tries to discuss it merely assembles unrelated facts and sound bytes along one imaginary audio/digital axies. From production to consumption it bounces back and forth. Emitting half educated statements along the way.
A couple of articles, better researched would have been much better.
The bigger question is how I get my wife to approve the move of the Stereo from the attic into the living room.
750,000 HD DVD players and 2.7 million Bluray players have been sold in the last 18 months that the formats have been available. In those BluRay numbers are about 2 Million PS3 consoles included. 4 Million Bluray discs have been sold, 2.6 Million HD-DVD ones. Which comes down to 1.5 Bluray and 3.5 HD-DVDs per device.
The DVD of “Knocked up” alone sold more often than all HD-DVD and Bluray formats combined. I wonder how the marketing budgets would compare.
In 1998 9.8 Million DVD Discs had been sold. Almost ten discs for each player that was out there. People loved DVD. They still do. As for the two replacement formats they could care less it seems. And that’s only partly a problem of the rivaling formats. I think that DVD is good enough for people. Most simply have neither the hardware setup nor the desire to spend allot of money for the extra resolution that the new formats provide.
Here the DVD hardware sales:
315,136 1997 (April-December)
1,089,261 1998
4,019,389 1999
8,498,545 2000
12,706,584 2001
17,089,823 2002
21,994,389 2003
19,999,913 2004
16,147,823 2005
19,788,279 2006
10,252,893 2007 (January - July)
sources: current HD numbers past DVD device numbers, reversed via the linux ‘tac’ command. I had no idea it did exist. DVD disc numbers Warner DVD sales in 1998 DVD sales in 1998 and 1999
via IM, earlier today:
just wanted to tell you: we were training a new freelance producer and she said; "you use Interdubs? I love interdubs!"
Hit the 40,000 mark today. Nice.
Over at Independendant Arts Media Preservation I can read:
The complexity of digital media preservation is fourfold. First, data resides on a physical support–a floppy disk, CD-ROM, or hard-drive, for example–and this physical container or support naturally deteriorates. Second, the data itself may decay. Third, most software is proprietary and has no long-term technical support. Finally, hardware obsolescence makes a great deal of digital media inaccessible.
I would merge point 3 and 4 into one. 3 being able to be overcome by open source. Point #1 is also called Entropie, and it’s a real bitch. If you escape all illnesses and accidents it is will get you in the end. But the “data itself may decay” ??? Huh? How so? If bit’s are not what they used to be, than it’s the first point. Data is pure.
It is kind of scary that the people that tasked themselves with the preservation of stuff have such a bent understanding of the thing they like to protect. Somebody probably started his/her computing experience on a bug ridden system like Windows 95. I wonder what their plan against ‘self inflicted data decay’ may be.