Monthly Archives: August 2008

Installing PHP5 +apache2 using Macports on Leopard

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I have had all sorts of fun and games trying to get php5 and apache2 installed on Leopard using macports. Six months ago I eventually gave up after lodging a ticket with macports.org no matter how hard I tried or what advise I followed it simply wouldn’t install. In the end my colleague Andrew tar’ed up his /opt folder and I copied that onto my machine and did a chown to my username/group and had a working php5 and apache2 install.

I had some problems yesterday getting yaz installed on ubuntu and decided to follow some instructions that Andrew gave me to install it on Leopard instead. I decided to bite the bullet and attempt to do a pure PHP5 apache2 install under macports again, and then use port to install php-yaz. Suffice to say that I ran into similar problems to those I encountered six months ago.

However after persevering I managed to get it all installed what follows is a summary of how I got it to work, in case anyone else out there ( and judging by the board posts that’s lots of you) is still struggling, or waiting for Macports 1.7.0 to be released.

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Once it is done follow the original instructions here.

This is so convoluted!! I hope the Macports folks sort this out. Even the ticket I raised didn’t specify the steps I took as a fix, and I basically stumbled onto them through trial and error. If anyone has a better explanation for why this worked then please let me know. Otherwise I hope it helps anyone else experiencing the same difficulties.

Touché – An open source multi-touch framework

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Touché is an open-source multi-touch tracking environment for Leopard. It has been designed and written specifically for MacOS X Leopard and uses many of its core technologies, such as QuickTime, Core Animation, Core Image and the Accelerate framework.

The Touché environment consists of two parts: A standalone tracking application written in Cocoa, that comes with lots of configuration options as well as calibration and test tools, and a Cocoa framework that can be embedded into custom applications in order to receive tracking data from the tracking application. This way, you can easily experiment with MacOS X technologies such as Core Animation or Quartz Composer on your FTIR multitouch table.


Touché Multitouch Framework – Simple Demo Apps from Georg Kaindl on Vimeo.


Touché Multitouch Framework – Introduction from Georg Kaindl on Vimeo.

It’s pretty impressive stuff, but is dependent on a FTIR screen which it looks like you have to build yourself unless you can find someone to do it for you. However this might be an excellent 10% project at work for me, some of the modes of interaction I’ve been experimenting with for navigating large graphs of data would be more intuitive with a multi-touch interface … wow … *me has a cunning plan*.

Pear Tree Cottage

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Me, Richard, Cliff and Simon recently represented Kings Norton Traditional Archers in the 2008 South West Challenge, which took place in Devon and Somerset, with two shoots in each county. We opted against camping given the weather wasn’t going to be particularly good and we had a lot of equipment to take care of. Richard did some research and found Pear Tree Cottage in Stapely, which was situated almost in the middle of all four locations, in fact it was no more than 45 minutes drive to any of them.

It’s a lovely thatched cottage in a beautifully picturesque surrounding. The cottage has several acres of land which you are free to roam around and is about as far away as you can get from the hustle and bustle and noise of city life. I took a number of photo’s all of which are available on my flickr acount here.

On arrival at the cottage we were greeted by our host Colvin who welcomed us and showed us to our rooms and informed us of all those important things we needed to know like watch out for low hanging beams – something I wish I had remembered a couple of days later *ouch* 🙂 . Colvin and his wife Pam live in the cottage and rent several rooms out to guests. They were wonderful hosts who really took care of us and ensured our stay was as comfortable as possible. Pam cooked a wonderful full english breakfast every morning and even catered for my dietary prejudices with a wonderful smile that makes you instantly warm to her. She is a remarkable lady who kept us entertained with her stories about the local area and her views about the government which were amusing but also deeply touching as she related the plight of the country side. Her comments did make me reflect and I couldn’t help but feel that there is something deeply wrong with the world when we neglect the countryside and the heritage and culture that the small isolated communities that live out here are trying so hard keep alive. What was inspiring though was hearing Pam describe how the people living in this these communities do everything possible to support each other.


I’ll describe the challenge itself in another post, but I wanted to emphasise just what a wonderful place the cottage is, and relate just how wonderful Colvin and Pam are. If any of you are looking a nice, quiet, place to escape to I thoroughly recommend Pear Tree Cottage. To Colvin and Pam, I’d like to say thank you 🙂 and I really look forward to seeing you again for next years shoot.

Microsoft turns Surface into a Sphere

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Microsoft researcher Hrvoje Benko demonstrating the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Surface technology, called Sphere. It looks really cool, and when he shows the panoramic photos, it has a crystal ball quality that really appeals to me. The idea of using it as an interface onto Google Maps is also really compelling or certainly springs to mind when he shows the sphere rendering as a globe. Benko also demonstrates some of their ideas around what he feels are the unique advantages to a spherical display. For example multiple users can each get their own scrap of surface, which enables a kind of limited viewing privacy.

At first glance it looks awesome and you can even play Pong on it!