SteveLove.org

How to install PHP memcached on an Ubuntu server

2009-09-30T22:04:39Z

I needed to install memcached on my local development server the other day and hit several snags during the process when I couldn’t find a clear guide. It doesn’t help that there’s another package floating around called “memcache” which is not the same as “memcached”.

Fortunately I found this post in German which Google kindly translated for me, and it solved my problems.

Since the translation screws up some of the code, I thought I would post the steps here in English in case anyone finds it useful.

Step 1: LAMP

If you don’t already have PHP 5 and Apache2 set up, this will get you started. Open up a terminal and type:

sudo tasksel install lamp-server

Guiding you through setting up PHP and Apache is beyond the scope of this guide, so if you get stuck, check the multitude of guides available on Google.

Step 2: Upgrade LAMP

With PHP 5 and Apache installed, the next step is to install the developer versions.

php5-dev (otherwise you’ll get an error about “phpize”)
apache2-threaded-dev (or else you’ll get an “apxs” error)

 sudo apt-get install php5-dev apache2-threaded-dev

Step 3: Getting build tools

We’re going to be building from source. If you’ve never done that before it’s pretty easy, but first you’ll need some extra tools.

 sudo apt-get install build-essential

Step 4: PEAR and memcached

You’re also going to need PEAR and the memcached binary.

 sudo apt-get install php-pear memcached

Step 5: Building libmemcached

You’ll need to get the latest source package from here. For me, it was libmemcached-0.33. Download it with your preferred method, or type:

 wget http://download.tangent.org/libmemcached-0.33.tar.gz

Extract the files with your preferred method, or type:

 tar -xzf libmemcached-0.33.tar.gz

Move into the extracted directory:

 cd libmemcached-0.33/

Configure the package.

 ./configure

Make.

 make

Make install. Note this probably will require sudo rights.

 sudo make install

When this process completed, you should see something like this:

Build process completed successfully
Installing '/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/memcached.so'
install ok: channel://pecl.php.net/memcached-1.0.0
Extension memcached enabled in php.ini

If you see this, you should be ready to go.

You might instead get a message that says: You should add “extension = memcached.so” to php.ini. If that’s the case, open the file with the following and paste extension = memcached.so at the top:

 gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

After you save and close the file, restart Apache.

 sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Songs That Sound Like This Photo

2009-09-09T13:26:57Z

Some friends and I recently played a little game where we each chose a photo at random and created playlists of five to ten songs around a theme called Songs That Sound Like This Photo. Now that it’s over, I thought I’d share my creation.

The complete list and a Flash-based music player after the jump.

My photo happened to be one by a famous photographer that went by the name Weegee.

A playlist built around this photo could easily hinge around bubblegum pop, but I wanted to take it beyond that the way the couple in the photo takes PDA a little too far. It was while searching my music library that I came across “Rapture” by Pedro the Lion — which is a bit graphic and pushes some boundaries (especially if you’re familiar with the band) — and realized I had found one of the key stones of my playlist.

The complete list follows with some notes. Listen to the playlist with the Flash-based player at the end of this post.

1. The Chalets — Theme From The Chalets
This song could admittedly fall into the bubblegum category, but it’s really the first “sound” you hear when looking at the photo. Kind of whimsical and even a little funny. You really have to start here. (The version used in the Flash player at the end of this post sounds like a live recording. Not as great as the album version, but not bad.)

2. Pedro The Lion — Rapture
The opening line, while maybe a little shocking, carries just a tad of dark humor into the second track. Thematically this song is perhaps premature, but musically it seemed to fit best in this spot. There’s something about this couple choosing to make out during a 3-D movie in the middle of the audience that sounds to me like they’ve turned off their brains and are letting sensation guide them. This line from the song captures them pretty well: “We’ve gone too far/ We’ve done too much/ We have to quit it/ Just one more kiss/ Just one more touch/ Please 10 more minutes.”

3. The Twilight Singers — I’m Ready
When I received my photo, I knew I needed a song by either The Twilight Singers or Greg Dulli’s previous band, The Afghan Whigs. Something about Dulli’s music seems to match the vibe I was getting from the photo. Maybe it’s the sultry, gritty sound of New Orleans coming through. The track comes from The Twilight Singers album “Powder Burns” and it features a swelling intro called “Toward The Waves” that I included on my mixtape for a less abrupt transition from the last song.

4. Brazilian Girls — Losing Myself
This song marks a musical transition in the mix. It’s more of a party song than any of the previous tracks and returns to the fun side of the photo.

5. N.A.S.A. — Whachadoin (feat. M.I.A, Spank Rock, Santigold and Nick Zinner)
I’d honestly never heard this song before putting together the playlist. It was something I downloaded free from Amazon’s mp3 store as part of a sampler. I listened to it while searching my library for songs and something about it caught my attention. There was sort of an adolescent quality to the chorus (that as far as I can tell says) “Whachadoin? All the girls call my house and they say they see you out. Why you lie?” After the Pedro The Lion song, it was pretty easy to imagine the guy in this photo out cheating on his girlfriend. I think the intro is the weakest part of the song and don’t really care for it, so I actually cut out the first 20 seconds in the version I made for my friends.

6. Sara Lov — Let’s Get Physical
In 1981, Olivia Newton John recorded this song with the foreknowledge that 28 years later when I worked on this playlist I’d have a song that could not be a more perfect fit. Except that I chose a recent version by Sara Lov instead. When I first heard this song in 1981, the most important thing about it in my opinion was that I could easily change the words to, “Let me hear your booty talk.” Listening to it again now, the lyrics are actually very suggestive, if not totally forthright.

7. Moby — I Like It
I definitely wasn’t thinking about Moby when I first started putting this playlist together, but for some reason I stopped at his name in my music library. This song would have come much earlier in the list if I had been making this mix in middle school. Back then I had perfected a 3:1 fast to slow song ratio for making party mix tapes. Anyway, this song seems to match the more subtle sounds of the photo.

8. Interpol — Public Pervert (Carlos D Remix)
I’ll be honest. The reason I chose this song was solely because the title so easily fit the photo. Don’t get me wrong, I like the way it fits into the mix. Following Moby, it sort of pulls the mood back to the griminess of making out in a movie theater. (Unfortunately the version in the player below isn’t the full song. You can hear the whole thing here.)

9. Rilo Kiley — Portions For Foxes
Knowing better but doing it anyway.

10. Ida Maria — I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked
My playlist would have been complete without this song, but it’s just a lot of fun and I thought it was a great way to end the set of songs.

In which I continually search for a good Linux-based media manager

2009-08-25T20:30:53Z

When I used Windows as my primary operating system, my media manager of choice was Media Monkey. It’s still the best media player and manager, hands down. But the available options for Linux are a bit lacking in my opinion.

There are a few things I love most about Media Monkey.

The ability to look up albums on Amazon and import tag information en masse (or selectively).
The ability to create and fine-tune playlists with intelligent filters.
Media Monkey handles a huge music library (18,000+ songs) with ease.

There’s more to love, but since there’s no Linux version of Media Monkey and I’m not interested in running it on Wine, let’s just move on.

I’ve tried Amarok, and it’s decent, but as I’ve settled on the Gnome desktop environment, I don’t care to install KDE just for one application.

I’ve tried Rhythmbox, but … meh. There’s nothing to get excited about.

I’ve tried Jajuk, but since it’s running on Java, it just doesn’t feel right.

I’ve tried Songbird, and I like it in general, but it seems to eat up some serious system resources.

I’ve tried Banshee … and this one actually stuck for a while. Not the prettiest interface, but they’re working on it. It has some useful extensions and even plays streaming radio stations.

But then I started noticing some issues. For instance, I’d start up Banshee and try to connect to a streaming radio station. Nothing. No attempt to connect. No error message. Nothing. As if I hadn’t clicked anything at all. So I quit the application, start it up again, and try once more to connect to a radio station … and now it works. Unfortunately, this is the scenario 100 percent of the time.

One of the other features I liked about Banshee was that it had Last.fm built into it. I could dial in to my Personal Last.fm radio station and start listening to my Last.fm library. It was great and I tended to use it rather than my actual mp3 library. And one day it stopped working. Now it simply reports an error: “Failed to get new songs for Personal.”

So, I started listening to my actual mp3 collection. And that’s when I noticed how badly Banshee chokes on such a large library. The application is unresponsive at least once or twice before it even displays the track list. Just trying to browse the collection is enough to slow the system down so much that … well, I’ve started looking for alternatives again.

And now I’m using gmusicbrowser. You’re right, it’s ugly and it has a boring name. But it was actually developed specifically with massive mp3 libraries in mind. And in the unscientific estimate I came up with in my head just now, it’s at least two or three times faster than the other applications I’ve named when dealing with a large library. The interface is not the most intuitive, but as I figure things out, it definitely feels as powerful to me as Media Monkey.

I haven’t given up on Banshee. I’ll definitely try out future releases. As well as any other media manager that seems promising. Have any suggestions for me?

Clonezilla is pretty much awesome at system recovery

2009-07-11T19:16:32Z

Cross-platform Clonezilla is a great tool for handling your system backup and system restore needs. Just tested it out using the Live CD on my laptop and found it to be very fast and very successful.

Initially I used the stable release of Clonezilla to back up my laptop’s entire hard drive to a USB external hard drive. No problems at all. However, I hit a minor snag when restoring the system with the stable release in that it failed to re-install grub. Oops. Not to worry though, Clonezilla has an “alternative” release based off Ubuntu (the stable release is built on standard Debian). Since I happen to be running Ubuntu, I made a new Live CD with the alternative Ubuntu release and once again tried the system restore. This time it worked perfectly and my system is exactly as it was at the time I backed it up.

PNG background-repeat bug in Internet Explorer 7 and 8

2009-07-27T19:20:09Z

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and 8 still haven’t gotten PNG quite right. While working on one of my current projects, I stumbled onto a bug with repeating PNG background images.

For this project, I have a page template with several container elements that all have a 1 pixel by 1 pixel PNG background set to repeat, and it looks great when testing it in IE 7 and IE 8. So, I created my next page template with the same styling. This time, IE 7 and 8 both choked when handling the background-repeat. Instead of repeating, both of these browsers inexplicably tried to stretch the 1×1 image across the entire container. The PNG happened to have 60 percent alpha transparency, but I’m not sure that matters. A coworker suggested making it a 10×10 pixel image instead, just to see what happens. Surprise, surprise. That fixed it.

I did a little more searching to see if anyone else had come across this and found this recent blog post. The author also found that this bug appears to occur at random, and that a 4×4 pixel image solved his problem. Since there’s no very little file size difference between 10×10 and 1×1, I’ll stick with the 10×10. But I agree with him that this bug created a cool effect, and it would be great if it could be replicated at will.

Upgrading to VirtualBox 3.0 causes Linux guest to hang [Solved]

2009-07-09T03:48:36Z

I got to work a little early this morning and decided to upgrade to the new VirtualBox 3.0, which I use to run Ubuntu 9.04 as a guest on my 64-bit Windows Vista host machine.

The upgrade was simple as always and I experienced no issues … until I tried to boot up my Ubuntu VM. It appeared to hang during boot up, and finally ended in a kernel panic. Every time.

There’s an easy fix, however, which I found here after a quick Google search. The solution is to change the VM settings for the network adapter from “PCnet-FAST III” to “Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop”.

Dope OpenID 1.0.1 released

2009-07-09T02:31:50Z

Late last night I pushed out an update for Dope OpenID to add better support for Attribute Exchange with Google and other providers. You can download the latest version right now from the project page.

In addition, because Dope OpenID is an open source project, I’ve made the source code available on github. Collaborators are welcome! Or take the code and go in a completely different direction.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

2009-07-08T01:11:58Z

Just discovered that one of my favorite books from childhood is being made into a movie: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

How to install and set up Adobe Flex SDK on Ubuntu linux

2009-06-13T18:58:42Z

With the open source Adobe Flex SDK, developers using any operating system and any text editor or IDE can create rich Internet applications that compile into SWF files. This guide is for those wanting to install and set up the Flex SDK on Ubuntu linux.

What do you need to install Flex on Ubuntu?

The Flex SDK
Sun Java (needed for compiling the SWF binaries)

Set up and install Flex

Step 1. If you haven’t already, install Java. (If you aren’t sure, go ahead and try this step anyway.) First open up a terminal (Accessories menu > Terminal) and type the following:

sudo apt-get install java-package sun-java6-jdk

This will take several minutes while the packages download and install. You’ll also need to agree to Sun’s license.

Step 2. Download the Flex SDK. The rest of this guide will assume you saved the SDK to your desktop: ~/Desktop.

Step 3. We need to create a directory for the Flex SDK. In a terminal window, enter the following:

sudo mkdir /opt/flex

The “opt” directory is generally where optional application software packages live. (More info on the linux file system.) All we did here is make a new “flex” directory inside “opt”.

Step 4. Now we need to unzip the Flex SDK. Type the following in a terminal window:

cd ~/Desktop
unzip flex_sdk_3.zip -d tempflex

What this does is unzip the contents of your download into a new and temporary directory on your Desktop called “tempflex”.

Step 5. After that’s complete, we need to move these files to “opt/flex” which we’ve already prepared for the SDK. Type the following in a terminal window:

sudo mv tempflex/* /opt/flex/

This will move the contents of “tempflex” into “opt/flex”. If you want to make sure you moved everything, you can type the following into a terminal window:

cd /opt/flex
ls

You should see a list of all the files in the directory.

Step 6. Last step. All we need to do now is let Ubuntu know where the new Flex compiler lives. Type the following in a terminal window to open up “~/.bashrc” in a text editor:

gksudo gedit ~/.bashrc

Note the use of “gksudo” because we want to run sudo graphically. For more information on this, see this article.

The text editor will open your ~/.bashrc profile and we only need to add one line (I added it at the bottom of the file, but I’m not sure it matters).

export PATH=/opt/flex/bin:$PATH

Save the file and close the text editor. Then exit all open terminal windows before opening a new one. This should ensure that your terminal loads the path that we just added.

You should now be able to compile your Flex projects with the “mxmlc” compiler command. To make sure, type the following in a terminal window to bring up the “help”:

mxmlc --help

Looks good? Great. You’re all set. Happy Flex-developing.

Goals for the remainder of this year

2009-06-03T03:41:27Z

At work this week we were asked to list out some goals for the year. While thinking about what to write down, I searched the Web for some inspiration. I ended up pretty happy with my results, and fortunately for me, most of my work-related goals are also personal goals.

I realize we’re already four months into 2009, but I thought I’d go ahead and write a post to list out some goals. It’ll not only help me to remember them, but maybe I’ll get some tips on completing them in the comments.

Personal Goals

1. Become a better graphic designer, and become better with design tools.

I’m a mediocre designer. I can hack my way through Photoshop. For the last decade I’ve thought it would be pretty cool to have a Wacom tablet at my disposal. In retrospect, I’m glad I haven’t gotten one yet. But I think this will be the year.

Also, I use Ubuntu Linux at home and I want to become as comfortable with Gimp (or possibly Pixel) as I am with Photoshop. I’m not a fan of Gimp’s interface, but I know there are roundabout ways to make it do what I want to do. When it comes down to it, I’d rather learn Gimp than remain beholden to Photoshop on Windows/Mac.

I’d also like to dig into Inkscape and see what I can do with it.

2. Complete my PHP certification.

I’ve been using PHP to various degrees for about the last ten years. There’s still a lot that PHP has to offer that I haven’t had a need to learn. I started studying for the exam seven or eight months ago but got distracted by moving from California to Colorado. I’m setting a goal to have this done in about six months.

3. Learn C# and start contributing to some of my favorite Linux apps that run on Mono.

What could be more fun and rewarding?

4. Learn Flex.

I’m just really interested in Flex technology.

Goals for this Website

1. Change the theme.

Nothing’s wrong with the current one. I’d just like to create one that’s more “me”.

2. Finish the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin for Habari.

This is mostly done. However I discovered my hosting provider doesn’t allow “Bcc” in PHP’s mail function. I’ll have to use SMTP instead and I’m trying to figure out the best way to do this and make the plugin portable for other people.

3. Create a project page for the OpenID PHP class that I’ve been using.

This involves rewriting some of the code that I’m not happy with, and probably releasing it under a different name. I’ll also implement some of the suggestions from commenters, like setting up the source in a collaborative environment where others can contribute and creating a simple example script.

4. Start posting more often.

No excuse here.