Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

I am evaluating various nosql solutions for our existing/new projects. Bluesmoon recommended about Riak which is an awesome nosql datastore/database (and lot more).  I couldn’t wait to check it out.

As usual, I relied on Homebrew – the best package manage for OSX – to install applications/libraries. While installing, I got an error:

$ brew install riak
$ ...
$ Error: Failed executing: make all rel

After searching for a while, I figured out that there are known issues. With the help of Adam‘s comment on github, I was able to install Riak finally.

We make brew ignore Riak’s dependencies while building it.

Following commands should build and install Riak:

$ brew update
$ brew install erlang
$ brew install --HEAD --ignore-dependencies riak -v

FlashDevelop is an open-source IDE for Flash Platform development (ActionScript, MXML, HAXE, etc.) on Windows platform. I have extensively used it in past, and still, painfully, use it via windows virtual-machine on OSX host.

Couple of years back, I looked at FlashDevelop code to figure out, if we can port it for other operating-systems, such as Mac OSX and GNU/Linux.

I posted on Flash Develop forum about my experiments:

I have been trying to run FlashDevelop under OSX. In last couple of years, whenever I got sometime, I tried these:-

1. Run FlashDeveloper with DotGNU: FlashDevelop was running but due to a lot of native (Win32) API calls, lots of components were failing (screenshot: http://pic.im/5Xk)
2. Run Flash Developer with Mono: I tried to compile FlashDevelop using MonoDevelop and run using Mono for OSX. Most of the problems is one component/library i.e. DockPanelSuite (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/), an opensource code that uses a lot of PInvoke calls (Win32 API).

I am really excited about the possibilities, if we can port this one library we can get very closer to run FlashDevelop on OSX using Mono.

Note: pics.im seems to be dead, so I have uploaded new screen-shots

Some Ideas:

• Get rid of un-managed code (DockPanelSuite, etc.) and use managed code.
• Extend MonoDevelop to build FlashDevelop?

MonoDevelop is good enough and works well on OSX, I guess also GNU/Linux. However, I am yet to look at licensing and possibilities of forking the project (MonoDevelop)?

BTW! I have been lazy to write about such experiments on the blog, but while commenting on Jesse Warden’s post, I thought, it makes sense to post it here, so it lives.

Please let me know, if you have any ideas about making this happen? I would be happy to collaborate, contribute and donate in whatever capacity I can.

Snow Leopard Installer DVD was delivered in our office on Saturday and I couldn’t wait to upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6.x). I could have upgraded earlier, if Apple had enough stores and better reseller network in India.

Anyway, upgrade was smoother  compared with Tiger(10.4.x) to Leopard (10.5.x) upgrade. Installer UI has around 4-5 steps and none of steps mention “upgrade” word. Installer is smart enough to detect existing installations, figure out which printer drivers to keep or install. However, it chooses all languages (translation) to install even when you didn’t have those in Leopard.

Within fourty mintues, upgrade was completed and I was back in action.

However, In my case, I have to spend some more time to setup/fix things which were broken, such as:-

1. Reinstalled MacPort using installer for snow-leopard and upgraded some of packages (libiconv, jpeg, libpng, libmycrypt, openssl, gettext, freetype, openssl, curl) and their dependencies for 64bit compatibilities (+universal, +variants)
2. Compiled Apache, MySQL and PHP for 64 bit
3. Reinstalled Remote Desktop Connection using latest installer to fix crash issue on Snow Leopard

If you don’t want to use MacPorts, you can download source of these libraries separately, compile and install. These would be installed in /usr/local unless you change the prefix.

Installing 64 bit version of Apache, MySQL and PHP took around two-three hours because of some issues related to libiconv.2.dylib. Apache would compile but fail to run, reporting incorrect version of libiconv. I downloaded libiconv source, compiled and installed it in /usr/lib (instead of /usr/local/lib). Apache started working but  vim, make, other unix programs (chmod, etc) failed to run using latest libiconv.2.dylib.

I tweaked the setting in /usr/sbin/envvars to use following:-

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:/opt/local/lib:/sw/lib

Basically, added a fallback path so if library is not found in /usr/lib, it would look into other directors, as specified.  After doing this, Apache (64bit) and vim, make, chmod, etc started working.

MySQL compilation was straight forward with following command, thanks to this link, I just added CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″  while compiling to make sure mysql is compiled for 64 bit. Moved data directory back to new mysql installation directory.

Compiling php 5.2.13 resulted into some errors related to iconv, hash and gd. After spending sometime, I decided to compile without these extensions with following commands:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6
CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp"
CCFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -g -Os -pipe"
LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -bind_at_load"
export CFLAGS CXXFLAGS LDFLAGS CCFLAGS MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php5 --exec-prefix=/usr/local/php5 --disable-dependency-tracking --sysconfdir=/private/etc --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --enable-cli --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-libxml-dir=/usr --with-openssl=/usr --with-kerberos=/usr --with-zlib=/usr --enable-bcmath --with-bz2=/usr --enable-calendar --with-curl=/usr --enable-exif --enable-ftp --without-gd --with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local/lib --with-png-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-ldap=/usr --with-ldap-sasl=/usr --enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --with-mysql=mysqlnd --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-sock=/tmp/mysql.sock --with-iodbc=/usr --enable-shmop --with-snmp=/usr --enable-soap --enable-sockets --enable-sysvmsg --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --without-xmlrpc --without-iconv --with-xsl=/usr

#if everything goes well
make

#if everything goes above, install php5 in /usr/local/php5
sudo make install

I checked (php -m) some extensions (xdebug, etc) were not loading, so I updated those individually, specially iconv, xmlrpc and gd. Compiling an extension is generally four step process. For example, if you want to compile iconv, you can do the following:

$ cd /php-source/ext/iconv
$ phpize
$ ./configure --with-iconv=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

It all worked fine, apache was loading php fine and all my websites and applications work fine.

ISyncSession record validation failure: Value other pushed for enumeration property service on com.apple.contacts.IM is not an allowed value.

If you get above error while synchronising your OSX addressbook with Google Contacts, you might want to remove various IM types (Skype, Google Talk, etc) specified for contacts. OSX AddressBook can only accept “AIM”, “Yahoo”, “Jabber”, “MSN” and “ICQ” as types.