Blogs

With most folks focused on Facebook apps or the latest YouTube craze, a lot of incredible projects go unnoticed for way too long. Several months ago someone on irc.freenode mentioned reCAPTCHA to me, an amazingly novel idea that keeps spammers out while digitizing literary works.

I compiled the latest version of PHP this week at work. It took longer than I expected and dealing with the myriad of package dependencies required to add support for XML/XSLT, GD, and Sybase/MS SQL Server was a PITA. While I know that *nix server administrators must be able to compile software from source, I wouldn't want to make it a regular practice.

Just like Linux distributions, Unix package managers exist for Mac OS X. There are two package managers available for the Mac: MacPorts and Fink. Although Fink appears to have a much larger user base, MacPorts is more closely tied to Apple's open source community. In this post I'll go over how you can use MacPorts to manage Unix libraries, modules for languages including Perl and Python, and open source applications, including Wordpress, MediaWiki, and Gallery.

Okay, okay, I know, what you're going to say. Every techie blogger has already spouted off their list of "can't live without" Firefox extensions. To be honest, it's been a while since I last posted and needed something easy to get me back into the swing again.

So here's my list of Firefox extensions that I've just gotta have for web development and life on the Net.

Are you ready to take a step beyond writing code in a text editor like UltraEdit, BBEdit, or TextMate? Would you like to see those PHP and JavaScript syntax errors in the editor, without transferring files to the server or opening a browser? If so, then you're ready to jump into the world of the IDE — Integrated Development Environment. I'll compare the free, open source Eclipse IDE to a few of its commercial competitors Then we'll go through the steps to install Eclipse PDT All-In-One, the Zend Debugger, JSEclipse, and Subclipse.

By now you're probably thinking that I'm a Yahoo! evangelist. But who wouldn't want to tell other web developers about all of the great web developer resources that Yahoo!'s released? I know it may sound sad, but I just about wet myself when I found the YUI Grid Builder.