You have a blog and you are proud of it. Your sense of self-worth depends on how many people are following it. Making a detour to FeedBurner every day (the feed stats only update once a day) to check on your vitals is simple and does not take long (with a bookmark) but there has to be a more automated way.

His better way involves tying together the speech recognition that OS X offers, the "say" command line tool and a PHP5 script that can go out and read/parse the FeedBurner XML information for your website. Throw in a little command line script and some set up in the Speech tools and you have a handy little script that can fetch your latest stat information just from your request.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last fall, Apple (finally) included a modern version of PHP (currently version 5.2.6 as of this writing). [...] However, the default install of PHP that Apple included didn't include all of the available PHP extensions. Most notable is the IMAP extension, which is used in SugarCRM for the Campaigns and Emails modules. However you can build this extension and have it loaded dynamically, without affecting the rest of the default PHP install.

He shows where to get the packages and libraries you'll need to get the support working. The method involves building a shared module and including it to be loaded in your php.ini. This way it doesn't disrupt anything the current build has and you don't have to recompile everything over again.

If there is anything you should gleam from this article for future reference, Leopard comes with a 64bit Apache installation.

He points out this fact because, if you go and build it as per the normal install instructions, it will toss a "wrong architecture" error. He points out a blog post from Marc Liyanage that helped him understand a bit better. His fix was to run Apache as 32 bit instead of trying to get PHP to compile up to its 64 bit standards. He even includes the two commands you'll need to change Apache over to run this way.

Finally, I switched entirely to Mac. It is a little frustrating that there is not a complete resource on how to set up a web development enviroment on Mac OS X. The majority of tutorials are outdated. I will try to write this guide as complete as possible.

The guide provides basic installation instructions for PHP, MySQL (XAMPP or MAMP), the configuration of these two packages, throwing XDebug in to help with your debugging, installing Subversion and picking out your IDE of choice. He also suggests a somewhat optional step - setting up a Windows virtual machine to be able to test things out cross-platform without the need for a separate machine.

Here's more information from their press release:

Blue Static today is announcing the release date of MacGDBp, a native Cocoa application that allows Web developers to debug their PHP applications. The tool makes use of the Xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org) PHP extension that provides remote debugging functionality. Blue Static will be releasing the software under the GNU GPL version 2 on the morning of Tuesday, 17 June 2008.

The interface for the application is modeled after the XCode product from Apple to help integrate it more fully into the OS look and feel. It will require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to run and screenshots of the tool can be found here and here.

Hot off the press, Kuassi points out that Oracle Instant Client for Apple Mac OS X (Intel x86) is now available from the Instant Client page on OTN. It's the latest 10.2.0.4 patchset.

The 10.2.0.4 release of Instant Client for Windows 32bit and Linux x86 have also been released.

The Oracle Instant Client is a lightweight version of the standard Oracle functionality that's not only smaller but allows installation of an Oracle client without having to do the full Oracle install.

Installation of PHP-GTK 2 on MacOS X 10.4 and 10.5 is actually pretty simple, as it can use the latest PHP-GTK installer, which works just like any other Mac installer.

They include screenshots as a guide to the step-by-step (extremely simple) process of getting the software installed.

For those interested in technical details, a complete list of the prerequisites is given at step 2 of the installation. Download the installer at http://www.kix.in/php-gtk2/PHP-GTK-2.0.0.dmg

There is one thing I do need over everything else: remote debugging. Having used Zend Studio for 3 years now it hasn't been the best editor ( I'd rather prefer PHPEclipse/PDT ) but the remote debugging facility is superb [...] Eclipse it has all the tools you need to develop with but the debugging is slow, way too slow!

He's looking for anyone out there that might be able to help him speed up the debugging on his Leopard-installed version of Eclipse ("So slow actually that I had to install Zend Studio 5.5 for whenever I have to debug a file...")

While reading through news and blog entries, I came across a post on Zend's Developer Zone about Paul Reinheimer's new PHP Function a Day website. The Function a Day site functions in much the same way as those nifty tear-off-a-page-per-day desktop calendars we all buy for those on our Christmas shopping lists for whom we can't quite figure out what to get.

TO help out the lazy out there, he's created this widget to grab the latest image from the funcaday website and pull it right into your Dashboard.

There are a bunch of things wrong with Leopard, but over all I'm pretty happy with it. I did, however, have a bit of a hard time getting my development environment up and running (I did a clean install). I'll outline the steps that I took to get a functioning Apache, PHP, MySQL installed. Sure, you could use the leopard-bundled Apache and PHP, but if you're like me, you generally upgrade PHP (and use weird extensions) a lot more often than Apple will upgrade it.

He walks through the entire installation, complete with the commands that'll need to be made to both make the install and configure the Apache instance to work with PHP.