Blog:

Setup complete local web server on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

As soon as latest versions of Drupal 6 work supposedly fine with PHP 5.3 I decided to give it a try with OSX 10.6 bundled PHP version. Many would say it misses mcrypt, but I don't need it at the moment. Here are a few tips on how to make web development environment working on Snow Leopard. Actually it's probably complete walk trough for majority of cases.

Download and install official MySQL package: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. Then we need to change MySQL socket location as somehow OSX would use not so standard path. Most probably you'll receive "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock'" error in your PHP applications.

DrupalDevDays 2010. Munich

It was an absolutely lovely Drupal event to attend. Well organized, nice sessions, great venue and oh... unlimited buns and pretzels! I just love bread after all.

The amount of sessions in English were not as good as at last year's Drupal Camps Copenhagen or Vienna though. But still the selection was nice. And hey, with more then 300 attendees it was one of the largest Drupal Camps I think.

And it turned out München is a lovely city. It was my first time there, but I didn't even scratched the surface. Will definitely go back soon to check it out on less busy schedule.

Compile and install lynx browser on OSX 10.6

Looks like after setting up PHP I'm now a compile-my-own adept. Here is my take on lynx web browser.

You may ask why would you need lynx at all? Well. There are many uses: usability and accessibility testing, understanding content layout without CSS tricks, checking SEO points (you see the site about the same as search engine sees it) and much much more. After all it looks so geeky :)

Fix wrong color in your web images

If you will Google it a bit there are many complains for this issue: why the colors on my photo uploaded to some website are not so vibrant as on my laptop/desktop?!? The answer is pretty simple: mismatched color profile.

A bit of technical background (let's take jpeg image format and sRGB color space as most used): the ColorProfile is embedded as text (aka metadata) string in you jpeg file. And it will not touch any image pixel data stored in jpeg. In ideal world your hardware and software (say operating system, display, video card, browser, printer etc) should read and obey it to give your image the colors according to embedded metadata. But unfortunately it is not yet so despite ICC standards are available for many years.

Compile PHP 5.2 on OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Since OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard) I've gone supposedly easy way using MAMP as dev server. I never really liked it but now it was insane: turned out MAMP is so hogging the system on OSX 10.6. The only way was to have some native 64-bit server running PHP 5.2.x. I really feel that 64-bit apps are much faster at least at releasing some valuable RAM.

I don't yet like MacPorts, not sure for what reason (yep, I'm picky). So the only way was to compile PHP and libraries by myself. Thanks internets (Drew, Stanley, Stewart and others) for tips! Here is my take: