Month: November 2009

Compiling PHP on Snow Leopard

If you’ve been having trouble compiling your own PHP installations on Mac OS X 10.6, here’s the secret to making it not suck! After running the configure script, edit the generated Makefile and make these fixes:

  • Find the EXTRA_LIBS definition and add -lresolv to the end
  • Find the EXE_EXT definition and remove .dSYM

Standard make and make install should work from here…

For reference, here’s the whole configure line I currently use; MySQL is installed from the downloadable installer; other deps from MacPorts:

‘./configure’ ‘–prefix=/opt/php52’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql’ ‘–with-zlib’ ‘–with-bz2’ ‘–enable-mbstring’ ‘–enable-exif’ ‘–enable-fastcgi’ ‘–with-xmlrpc’ ‘–with-xsl’ ‘–with-readline=/opt/local’ –without-iconv –with-gd –with-png-dir=/opt/local –with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local –with-curl –with-gettext=/opt/local –with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config –with-tidy=/opt/local –enable-pcntl –with-openssl

Putting the media in Wikimedia!

I’m here in the city of lights for Wikimedia’s big Multimedia Usability meeting. We’ve got a fair chunk of our MediaWiki devs and folks with more of the media & communications organization end in one place to hash out some of the key issues and see what we can really accomplish in the short and medium term, including long-needed reworking of the upload interface and the workflow of manually tidying up metadata for newly uploaded files — sometimes coming in batches of many thousands!

Since my free time’s pretty low these next couple months I’m trying to keep my own commitments to where I can pack the most punch…

Things to do proof of concept coding to confirm our implementation theory:

  • Metadata!
    • Proof of concept for template/field/subtemplate extraction and mapping to RDF
    • Try to organize w/ Robert about how to store and search the attached RDF fields in Lucene
    • [Note I’ve been pulling existing exif data to get some stats about what can be pre-extracted; only about 7% of Commons files with EXIF data have a ‘Copyright’ field.]

Things to ponder specs on:

Other things to peek at and give some directional advice on:

  • Check out what it’d take to integrate Geohack tools better (via Magnus)
  • Take a peek at Unicode encoding & keyboard input problems for some languages requiring funky script support such as Malayalam (via Gerard)

Update: Also want to poke XMPP RC test setup per Duesentrieb. :D

StatusNet on TranslateWiki

Ok, we’ve got localization for StatusNet set up on TranslateWiki — setup was pretty straightforward and they’re excited about supporting us. Big thanks to Siebrand Mazeland for getting a test setup in yesterday and the live setup today! [And of course thanks to GerardM for pimping out TranslateWiki every chance he gets — lots of cool stuff going on there now!]

Portal page for our project:
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:StatusNet

There’s still some rough edges in the display for gettext-sourced translations, and I want to make sure we’ve got the update process going cleanly, but it seems to be working pretty well. We’ve already had some fixes to the German translation, and I’ve confirmed that I can pull and commit updates from TranslateWiki into git — yay!

To get set up, create yourself a login and hit up the requests page to get your edit permissions confirmed.

If you need to grab TranslateWiki folks live to poke something, right now the best place is the #mediawiki-i18n channel on irc.freenode.net; Siebrand and Nikerabbit are our main contacts there. There’s also a web gateway to the channel.

I’m also collecting some ideas for improvements to the interface and process on my user page.

— brion vibber (brion @ status.net)