Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Oct
31.

Just in case anyone runs into trouble with this, I just want to describe the steps for installing the symfony framework on an OS X 10.5 (Leopard) machine.

The good news is that Leopard comes with PHP 5 built in. The bad news is that PEAR is not included, which is needed to install symfony in the most convenient way.

My first attempt to remedy the situation was to run the darwin ports package manager to install pear:

# port install pear-base

Unfortunately there were two problems. First of all, the version of pear that comes with darwin ports does not use the OS X version of PHP by default, but rather looks for the PHP darwin port. This was easily remedied by adding export PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=`which php` to /etc/profile but unfortunately that’s not enough. The second problem is that a few files seems to be missing in the darwin port of PEAR and you’ll get the following error when you try to install symfony:


PEAR_Downloader::require_once(Structures/Graph.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Downloader.php on line 1230

Indeed, even running pear install Structures_Graph results in this error message.

The Solution

This blog suggested go-pear.php as an alternative way to install PEAR on the Mac and it does work. So with no further ado, this is how to install symfony on Leopard:

sudo su -
curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear > go-pear.php
php -q go-pear.php

pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear install symfony/symfony

Good luck with your Leopard powered symfony hacking.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.

If you’ve been reading our blog before, you’ve probably already figured out one thing: we love Open Source and Apple products. Because of this, all our desktop machines run either Linux or Mac OS. Although our mixture of platforms might not be representative for all organizations, this article is still likely to apply to all start-ups and companies that are trying to create a company-wide policy for document-formats.

In our organization today we have three different office suites:

While all of these office suites have their pros and cons, they work just fine until the moment you try to move between suites. In the past in most organization it was often the case that everyone was forced to use Microsoft Office because some manager was bribed by Microsoft upper management said so. However, this is no longer a reasonable approach when we have a more diversified desktop environment than ever before. Today it’s no longer rare that we have Macs and PCs running both Windows, OS X and Linux in the same network. Because of this, forcing all users to use Microsoft Office is no longer reasonable.

First out: Microsoft’s .doc/.xls/.ppt

We’ve concluded that requiring all users to use the same software is unreasonable, but we still need to decide on one document-format that all users can both read and write. The first document format that comes to mind is the .doc-format for documents, and the .xls-format for spreadsheets. Let’s analyze this option a bit.

License: Microsoft’s own proprietary format.

Application .doc .xls .ppt
Open Office Yes (but layout problems) Yes Yes (but layout problems)
Apple iWork Yes (but layout problems) Yes (but uses a different structure natively) Yes (but layout problems)
Microsoft Office Yes (native) Yes (native) Yes (native)

Verdict: Ok, so all of the above editors support Microsoft’s proprietary file-formats. However, the drawback is that it is a proprietary format, which means that both iWork’s and Open Office’s implementation of these formats are most likely reverse-engineered. The real implication of this reverse-engineering is that the support is not really perfect. As you might have experienced, when using Open Office or Pages to export to .doc files, oftentimes the layout of the document is ruined. Since they layout tends to be quite important in business-documents, I would consider this a major drawback.

Next: Open Office’s .odt/.ods/.odp (Open Document Format)

You’ve probably already figured out that this would be our favorite, but let’s try to be unbiased. Similarly to the .doc/.xls/.ppt-combo, we’ll start out with a table of the support in the relevant applications.

Licensing: Creative Commons.

Application .odt .ods .odp
Open Office Yes (native) Yes (native) Yes (Native)
Apple iWork No No No
Microsoft Office Yes, with plug-in Yes, with plug-in Yes, with plug-in

Verdict: Unfortunately it seems like the Open Document Format won’t work. Here the biggest problem is iWork. It is really a shame that Apple chose to not include support for this format. However, there might be an answer for why this is. According to Apple’s list of features in Leopard, we can see that there’s support for Open Document Format in TextEdit. Without having any evidence at all for this claim, we would guess that Apple intentionally chose to not include the support for Open Document Format in iWork simply because they would add support for the format on OS-level in Leopard.

The decision

As you can see in the charts above, none of the two alternatives is perfect. What holds the .doc/.xls/.ppt-combo back is its proprietary nature. Because of this, all the other applications fail to read and write these files good enough for a corporate environment. What holds the Open Document Format back is the lack of implementation in iWork. Moreover, it might also be cumbersome to have to use a plug-in to read and write Open Document Files in Microsoft Office, even that that’s still better than no support at all.

The bottom line is that at this point, the only possible approach is to use the .doc/.xls/.ppt-combo. Although we don’t like it, we’re out of luck with Open Document Format due to the lack of support in iWork. However, because of the uncertainty of the support of Open Document Format in Leopard, we will actually wait and see until it’s launched to take a formal policy decision on our Document-format.

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Introducing YippieMove '09. Easy email transfers. Now open for all destinations.
Oct
12.

Wow! Has it been one year already? Yes! Today marks exactly one year since we first published a short introduction to the blog (Starting Up). Since then we’ve had more than 90,000 unique visitors. In this celebration post, I’d like to re-cap the year, and bring you a list of the three most successful articles we’ve written over this past year.

1. Why Gentoo Shouldn’t be on Your Server (~40,000 views)
Slashdot
Our by far most popular article during the course of the year was an article called “Why Gentoo Shouldn’t be on Your Server.” Not only did this article catch a great deal of attention on blogs and forums around the world, but it even made it to Slashdot. The reason why this article became so widely read was because it discussed something that apparently is a very sacred Open Source-topic: Gentoo Linux. This Linux-distribution is considered by many as the most elite and advanced distribution because of its endless abilities to customize for you own needs. Our article took a look at how that kind of flexibility fares in the server world, and how it worked out for us after a year of use. We wrote that while we liked the distribution, it didn’t seem like the best idea to run it on a production server. Gentoo could be a great distribution for the lab-machine where you would want to stay updated with the most recent versions of everything, but for our production servers we would rather have something more stable that requires less frequent updates (only security updates), such as FreeBSD or Ubuntu (LTS).

2. Building a modern IT infrastructure for a small company (10 clients) with a sub-$3,000 budget (~18,000 views)

Interestingly enough, this article made it to the top without being mentioned on any of the big blogs: instead the majority of our visitors found the article through Stumbleupon. The article is the first in a series of two articles about how to create a modern IT infrastructure from scratch with an extremely small budget. To achieve this, we heavily rely on Open Source software for all parts of the organization. Without going into details, we utilize a software suit called LTSP to turn a set of cheap old computers into modern thin clients.

In the first article, we talk about the entire concept of using LTSP and how everything fits together. In the second article (Deploying the sub-$3,000 IT-infrastructure), we actually deploy this concept in a real company. Not only do we discuss how we ended up setting everything up, but we also provide detailed information on the exact hardware used, how it was configured, and what the actual cost was.

3. Bye Bye Binders, I Won’t Miss You at All (~10,000 views)
Lifehacker
This article was a bit different from the articles we usually write, but it turned out to draw quite a lot of attention and it made it all the way to Lifehacker. In this article we wrote about how your could turn those ugly binders in your bookshelf into something more useful and pretty — a set of PDF-files. If you do have a scanner with Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), this guide helps you organize all of those documents into conveniently accessible PDF-files.

So what did we learn over this past year?

  • Digg is overrated. If none of the few power-diggers ‘diggs’ your post, you probably won’t receive any noticeable traffic.
  • Stumbleupon is very sporadic and unpredictable. Even though no major blog wrote about our LTSP article, it’s still the second most visited article on our blog.
  • Blogging takes time. Although we really enjoy writing most of the articles here, it does take a whole lot of time.
  • You need quite a bit of traffic to make any money of a blog. Even though we’ve had over 100,000 visits this past year, the revenue we’ve made in advertisement doesn’t even cover our hosting costs.
  • It takes time to establish a user-base. Nowadays we receive more traffic in a couple of days than we did in a month in the beginning.

We hope that you’ve enjoyed the first year of Playing With Wire, and that you will enjoy another year with our technology, internet and startup articles.

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