items from the mind of an idiot savant

not fit for print

I picked up my new Sony Ericsson W810i phone from the post office this morning. It was really easy to set-up. I just pulled out the SIM card from my old phone, and put it in the new one, and viola the phone was up and running. None of my contacts or other personalized setting were on the new phone, so I’ll have to take care of that. The battery had almost a full charge out the box. I was able to use the phone right out of the box. I surfed around the menus on the drive into work this morning.

When I got to work, the first thing I tried was plugging the phone in over USB into my Windows XP workstation. Windows was very good about finding drivers, and this thing needed about 4 different drivers. I’m not what all the functions of the device are, but I am able to put the phone into “file Transfer” mode and the phone and the memory card show up like removable drives in My Computer. The coolest thing, is that the phone charges over USB. That’s so cool!

Now that I have the phone plugged into my Windows PC charging, I turned on the Bluetooth to get my contacts from my Mac onto the Phone. The Mac Bluetooth Set up Assistant got it up and running in no time. iSync swooped in and zapped all my contacts over to the phone.

That was fast! while I’m working, I like to monitor my phone with BluePhoneElite. Since the new phone was already paired to my Mac, it took all of 2 seconds to change BluePhoneElite’s preferences.

THe first thing I’ve noticed from using the new phone, is how fast it is. It is really responsive to commands and getting around the menu is fast.

On the way out to lunch, my coworker Jonah[you know, from Jonah's secret blog] asked if it mounts as a drive over USB on my Mac. It does, and iPhoto detects it as a camera and prepares for import. That will save some time.

I encoded some aac audio files, loaded them over USB and bam! Walkman!

To get data access to the phone, all I had to do was go to this link, and make a few selections. They sent em the configuration via SMS, and BAM! Internet access. This is going great.

Now that I have internet access, I thought I’d try the built-in software update. 2 seconds to find out I have the most up to date. With internet access I thought I should get a decent Web browser. Used the crappy built-in browser to get Opera Mini. Just go to mini.opera.com using the phone and download and install. DOUBLE BAM! We all love google maps right? How about using it on on you phone. On your phone, go to www.google.com/gmm

Setting email is slow and kind of sucks since I have to use the stupid number pad to enter in server names and email addresses. Now I have to install certificates for the SSL encryption to use Gmail. I had to do this for the old phone. WHAT A BITCH!!! There is little documentation and help on setting up google mail on the built in mail client. Here are the settings:
Email address: USERNAME@gmail.com
Connection type: POP3
Incoming server: pop.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com
Username: USERNAME@gmail.com
Encryption / Incoming Server: SSL
Encryption / Outgoing Server: SSL
Incoming port: 995
Outgoing port: 465

Now here’s the magic ingredient… The W810 doesn’t ship with the proper certificate to verify the SSL encryption. You need to install it yourself. You could probably find the right certificate online somewhere online, but I couldn’t. Here’s an easy way I found. On Mac OS X 10.4, open the Keycahin Access application. Select the X509Anchors from the Keychains list on the left. Find the “Equifax Secure Certificate Authority” certificate. Select just that certificate. From the File menu, select Export. Export the certificate as a .cer file. Know send the new .cer file to the phone via bluetooth, and your done. It is simple, yet hard to figure out.

I grabbed a bunch of free themes from Esato.com.
I downloaded a bunch of free games from SonyEriccson’s WAP site.

Well that’s enough for now, But I’ll share my new ringtone with you.
Ring Away: Macarena.m4a.

Still to do:
Get my Mac to use the phone as a modem over bluetooth
Get the phone to use Cingular’s high speed Edge network
Explore Media management software
Get some sort of Instant Messaging software for the phone
probably more…

So Tutorial 5 went smoothly for you? FUCK YOU MAN!

I thought everything was going smoothly. I actually was starting to understand all the concepts and thought I was running on all cylinders. That was until I got to the very last part.

I implemented the changes in order to paginate my list of questions. In fact I was rather astounded that symfony has such constructs built in. After making my changes, it didn’t work. I noticed that I backtracked just one step to the point were the number of questions on a page was a hardcoded integer, it worked fine. There was something up with that aplication variable thingy. I tried clearing the symfony cache with $ symfony cc. No luck.

Like the retard that I am I start flailing and doing anything I can think of. I run all the symfony init-app and init-module command and deleted files and removed changes. By the end of it all, My askeet installation was totally fucked up and didn’t work at all. It wasn’t even accessing the DB properly. A total disaster really.

I was forced to go back a day and check out day 4 from subversion and redo day 5. After all that spazzing out and redoing work, I was right back were I started. I had paginataion that only worked with a hardcoded number and not the application variable.

I did some reading and found that other people were having the same problem. After talking to Jon[the coworker who turned me on to symfony] I figured out that I did in fact have to clear the symfony cache. But that alone still wasn’t working. I also learned that the app.yml file generates a file in the cache folder. I found the corresponding cache file, but it was empty. After clearing the cache and making some changes to app.yml, it was still empty.

FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!

I starting messing with the spaces, tabs, and returns in the app.yml file thinking that I might be having some more of those silly copy/paste funky characters like the ones I was dealing with in day 4. I found that I wasn’t have the same problem, but a new one. My guess it that the YAML parser that converts app.yml into the cahced php file is finicky about where you put tabs/spaces, and how many you use. I found that you should only spaces, and that you should only use consistent spacing per indent.

The bottom line is that the tutorial doesn’t tell you to clear the cache, and on top of that you need to be careful with your spacing. OK, time to commit my changes to subversion and move on.

Tutorial 4 went fine. I kept having all these question marks show up on the reulsting page, and I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Since The tutorial didn’t take me much time, I decide to troubleshoot and figure it out.

It took no time at all to find the code around the question marks was, but it wasn’t immediately apparent where the mysterious question marks were. Right where I expected to find question marks, I found nothing! It turns out that the question marks were in the whitespace. I guess when I was copying and pasting from my web browser to my text editor there as some funky character encoding mismatch. All I had to do was delete the tabs and return and replace them to my liking.

AN EPIHPNAY
I’m really disappointed with myself for not seeing this sooner. I have a category of blog post called Ask Rick for all the random questions I get. I’m working on a question/answer database project called Askeet! Perhaps I should port all my Ask Rick blog posts to the the Askeet app. I’m sure you were able to draw this conclusion far sooner than stupid old me.

OK, Its questions like this that were really the motivation for Ask Rick!. Sure people ask me technical questions, and that makes sense. After all I’m a programmer. I have a good understanding of technical things. But I often get questions were my initial response is “Why the fuck are you asking me?”

Hey Rick, I want to get rid of an old fridge, who should I call? Can’t I just dump it in the nearest dumpster?

Um sure you could, but that’s probably illegal. Besides, for the sake of Pete, try to be a little more friendly towards the environment. Try calling you local power company. Often times they have recycling or buy-back programs on older less energy efficient appliances. Try a recycling center. If all else fails, you can call you local city’s bulky item pick-up and they’ll haul it away. It the city of Los Angeles, you can call the Bureau of Sanitation Bulky Item Pick-Up hotline at (800) 773-2489.

P.S. Thanks for the submission Mike! I love you.

I’ve taken about a week to get through 3 tutorials. Honestly, I would have taken longer if this week wasn’t a short work week on account of the holidays.

Actually I spend more time reading tangental info, and gathering research for these blog entries than actually going through the tutorials.

Earlier, I gave you the link to some great subversion documentation. And in case you’re just going through the tutorials I wanted to turn you on to the great Symfony documentation. Well dumbass, just click the documentation link at the top of the symfony project web site. I especially like how it is available as a downloadable pdf.

Seeing as I’ve taken so long to complete the first 3 days of the tutorial, I’d imagine that my copy of symfony is out of date and needs updating. OK, maybe not, but I found the instructions, and I update my software all the time, so I’m going to do it. And I’m not going to tell you how. You’re just going to have to look it up for yourself.

Today’s tutorial went without a hitch. Everything worked as advertised. In fact it only took me about 35 minutes. Just follow the tutorial and you’re fine.

Don’t forget to commit your changes in to your Subversion repository.

Hey, wasn’t that interesting how you had to get the css files from their repository? Did you notice how when you went to get them, you went to a directory called “tags/release_day_3″? That’s kind of cool how you can tag a version like that. I did some searching around and read that sometimes people will name the tag directory “releases”. That makes a bit more sense to me in english rather than “tags”. Except I realized that you may want have tags that are not necessarily releases. I suggest using both. That way people can get released versions, unreleased tagged versions, and even the current version.

So how the hell do you make a tag?
Well if you’ve been doing any of the digging I’ve been doing, you probably stumbled across this site: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/. Here’s how to Create a Simple Tag. If your setup like I showed you earlier, you can just do $ svn copy file:///$SVNREP_DIR/askeet/trunk file:///$SVNREP_DIR/askeet/tags/day3 -m "Tagging day 3".

You may not have noticed, but on day 3 we did something a bit different. We deleted a file. OH MY GOD! That’s simple enough, what’s the big deal? When you delete a file, subversion doesn’t realize it. You need to let subversion know that file is no longer being used. There’s probably some command line command to issue here, but I’ve had enough of that, and I work on a mac, so I’d like something a bit prettier.

I looked at a few Subversion GUI apps. I’m almost hesitant to say I like this one because it seems like they may switch the license from free to pay sometime in the future, and I’
m way too cheap to pay for software. Of the four or five Subversion GUI apps I looked at, I liked iSVN. You can probably find others by searching for subversion on MacUpdate or VersionTracker.

Setting up iSVN was easy. All I had to do was point it to my local working copy of aseet! and it figured out the rest. So the first thing I did was click the Commit button. It told me that a lot of my files had not been committed. Maybe we did something wrong earlier, but now iSVN has come to our rescue. So I commit my changes and everything seems to be fine now.

I liked how the example tutorial has tags for each day. Maybe we should do the same. I showed you how to do it earlier from the command line, but not all my files were in the trunk properly, so I’m going to do it again using iSVN.

I just right click[That's ctrl+click for you one button mouse people. And for the love of god, buy a multi-button mouse.] on askeet, and select “Browse Repository…”. It shows you the Subversion repository instead of only your local copy. I deleted my day3 tag so I can make a new one. I selected the trunk directory and “Copy To…”. I set the target directory to the tags folder, and renamed it to “day3″. That was way more intuitive than some command line, and I can always check to make sure that I’m creating a tag that doesn’t already exist. I’ll probably use both iSVN and the command line. Feel free to use what your comfortable with.

Hey Rick! I recently installed Acrobat and now all my PDF files open with Acrobat instead of Preview. How do I change this?

This one’s not just for Acrobat, but for any program. Filetypes get associated with certain programs. When you double click a file it will open that file in the associated program. By default double clicking .txt files opens them in TextEdit. But let’s say you always want to open .txt files with BBEdit, TextWrangler, Microsoft Word, or whatever. Just do this:

In the finder, located a .txt, or the or .pdf as in the original question.
Click the file once to select it, and choose get info from the file menu.
In the resulting properties window, locate the area labeled “Open with:”. It may be hidden and you may need to click the little triangle to expose the area.
From the drop down menu, select the program you want to associate to that type of file.
Click “Change All…”

Now all your .pdf, .txt, or whatever type of file you got the info for will open with the program of your choice when you double click them.

It’s worth remembering that when you install new programs, sometimes they will change these settings, but you can always change them back.

Time for Tutorial 2

Tutorial 1 took way longer than it should have. Mostly because of my ignorance, and the fact that things are just a bit different on the Mac. But today I just don’t have that much time. I have to be somewhere in an hour. I’m just going to blaze through tutorial 2.

Tools
TextWrangler - this not an absolute necessity, but this text editor is free and comes with a handy command line tool. In the terminal, you can just type $ edit somefile and it opens that file in TextWrangler. Rather handy. You could always use TextEdit, or pico, or your new best friend VIM.

MySQL - Keeping with the spirit of learning, I got version 5.0.14. Get whatever version you like, but be sure to get the Standard paackage.

MySQL Administrator - A nice little companion app to help administer the MySQL database server.

Installation
TextWrangler is a simple drag and drop installation. Throw the application anywhere you like, but /Applications is a perfect place.

MySQL Administrator is also a simple drag and drop installation.

MySQL is distributed as a package with some extras on the disk image. Go head and install the package. I also installed the Preference Pane just to have a quick and easy way to start and stop the server. I didn’t install the StartupItem since I don’t expect to use mysql all the time. I’d rather start and stop it manually for now. I can always add the StartupItem later.

Once MySql is installed, open the MySQL Preference Pane in the System Preferences and start up the server. Now open that MySQL Administrator program. Connect to localhost with user root and no password. Go to the accounts tab. Select the root user, change the password, and click “Save Changes”.

Changes to the tutorial
The tutorial is fine as is. There’s really nothing I needed to differently since I was on a mac. There are two things I would suggest though.

When you create the database$ mysqladmin -u youruser -p create askeet, I would do it as the root user. You know the one you set the password for in the MySQL Administrator earlier. I would then go to the accounts tab of the MySQL Administrator and a user. Call it askeet, and give it a password. Now click Add a host. Make it localhost. Click the triangle next to the askeet account from the list on the left to show the list of hosts. Select localhost. Switch to the “Schema Privileges” tab. Select the askeet database from the “Schemas” list. Select everything from the “Available Privileges” list on the far right, and click on the “<” button. Click “Save Changes”.

Essentially what we’ve done is created a user that only has the ability to make changes to the askeet database. This is a fairly standard security practice.

From now on when making database connections or setting database connections you should use the askeet user and not use root. This goes for the database connection info in the orm.yml file, and when you propagate the MySQL database with the generated schema in $ mysql -u youruser -p askeet < data/sql/schema.sql.

The other suggestion is a small simple one. Don’t forget to commit your changes to subversion: $ svn commit -m "Day 2 completed".

That’s all for today. This should take you about an hour. I’m sure we’re done with most of the Mac specific stuff. From now on we’ll be able to really learn and focus on symfony.

Lets do this tutorial on a Mac

Getting Started
The tutorial assumes that we have Apache, MySQL and PHP 5 installed. Apple installs Apache with the default Mac OS X installation, so we don’t need to do anything except turn it on. You can do this by starting “Personal Web Sharing” in the “Sharing” System Preference window. Day 1 of the tutorial doesn’t use MySQL, so let’s skip it for now and deal with it later.

Install PHP 5
Apple ships PHP 4 with the default installation, and it’s not even turned on by default. We’ll need to install PHP 5. The easy thing to do here is get the pre-compiled package from Marc Liyanage from this page. [As a small aside, Marc has done absolutely fabulous job of maintaining and distributing PHP for Mac OS X for quite some time now. Thank You Marc.] I downloaded version 5.0.4 release 1, mounted the disk image, and installed the package. The installer make the necessary modification to the Apache configuration, so you don’t need to do anything extra to get it to run under Apache. However, the installer does the smart and safe thing by not deleting any PHP 4 files just in case you need to reinstate them later. While this is the smart and safe thing to do, it poses a few obstacles for us.

Setup PEAR
The first step of the tutorial asks us to upgrade PEAR. [PEAR is a set of extensions to PHP. It's become so useful that it has been included with PHP 5 and later versions of 4. You can read more about PEAR here.] Upgrading PEAR makes use of the PHP command line binary, and needs version 5 to upgrade to the latest version of PEAR, the problem here is that we actually have 2 instances of PHP installed and the the PHP 5 version is not installed in the default location the PEAR expects it to be in. We need to do a few things to get everything in place.

First lets get the PHP 5 CLI in place. The default binary is at /usr/bin/php. Go ahead and move the PHP 4 CLI. Don’t forget to root up first.
$ sudo -s
$ mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php4
$ ln -s /usr/local/php5/bin/php /usr/bin/php
This moves the old PHP 4 CLI and then makes a symbolic link to the new PHP 5 version. The symbolic link allows any program or user that invokes the php tool from the terminal to use the new version.

Before we can upgrade PEAR, we need to modify the PEAR configuration. You see, PEAR installs a bunch of libraries and components to your hard drive and makes them available to PHP, but since we have two instances of PHP with version 5 being installed in the non default location, upgrading PEAR now will upgrade the PEAR files for the PHP 4 installation, and not the PHP 5 installation. The PHP 5 files are located at /usr/local/php5/ instead of /usr/lib/php. Feel free to inspect your current PEAR configuration with $ pear config-show.
Let’s set the new configuration parameters.
$ pear config-set bin_dir /usr/local/php5/bin/
$ pear config-set doc_dir /usr/local/php5/lib/php/doc/
$ pear config-set php_dir /usr/local/php5/lib/php/
$ pear config-set data_dir /usr/local/php5/lib/php/data
$ pear config-set php_bin /usr/local/php5/bin/php
$ pear config-set test_dir /usr/local/php5/lib/php/test

OK, your ready to upgrade PEAR. Do a $ pear upgrade pear. Did you get an error message? All that means is that in order to upgrade pear you first need to upgrade the required package. You might be asking “What package? Where do I get it from?” PEAR is pretty much self updating and self sustaining. Remember how you just told PEAR to upgrade itself? Just tell PEAR to upgrade to the required package.
$ pear upgrade Archive_Tar

Upgrade PEAR and you should see something like this:
$ pear upgrade pear
downloading PEAR-1.4.5.tgz ...
Starting to download PEAR-1.4.5.tgz (277,491 bytes)
.........................................................done: 277,491 bytes
Optional dependencies:
package `XML_RPC' version >= 1.4.0 is recommended to utilize some features. Installed version is 1.2.2
package `PEAR_Frontend_Web' version >= 0.5.0 is recommended to utilize some features.
package `PEAR_Frontend_Gtk' version >= 0.4.0 is recommended to utilize some features.
upgrade ok: PEAR 1.4.5

PEAR upgraded to version 1.4.5 OK. Those optional dependancies might be worth upgrading too, but we’ve covered PEAR enough for now, so let’s skip it and move on. [I did $ pear upgrade XML_RPC though. XML_RPC is pretty heavily used these days, and it's probably a wise choice to have that around too. I skipped the other two packages because since they are just alternative interfaces to PEAR package management, and they have there own dependancies and complications. We can always install them later if we need/want.]
[The funny thing is now you have 2 instances of PEAR installed. One at the default location of /usr/bin and the new one in /usr/local/php5/bin/. Check it out. $ pear info pear shows you the version installed is 1.3.5, but you just successfully upgraded to 1.4.5. Maybe you didn't. Trying to upgrade PEAR again fails and tells you you already the most recent version. Honestly, don't worry about it, just be aware of it in case it comes back to haunt us.]

Moving on with the actual tutorial
Install Symfony
like the tutorial says:
$ pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
$ pear install symfony/symfony-beta
$ pear install http://phing.info/pear/phing-current.tgz
All run without a hitch.
$ symfony -V gives us an error because the command line has no idea that we’ve stuck a bunch programs in /usr/local/php5/bin/.

A Quick Fix
You just need to add /usr/local/php5/bin/ to the $PATH variable. There’s plenty of info on how to do this on the Web, but in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, just do the following:
$ pico ~/.profile opens your profile configuration file in a terminal based text editor. On the line that reads “PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin” add “:/usr/local/php5/bin” without the quotes. Hit ctr+x, hit y to save the modified file, and then hit enter to save the modified version of the file in the same place as it was in. Close out of the terminal and open a new shell window. $ symfony -V should now give you its version number.

Project Setup
Move on with the tutorial, but feel free to put your version on the project somewhere other than /home/sfprojects/askeet. [I put mine in /Users/username/Projects/webDevelopment/askeet, maybe a better place would be /Library/WebServer/askeet, but it’s really up to you and your preferences. Just remember to use the path you chose instead of /home/sfprojects/askeet whenever the example does.

Web service setup
For this section , you only need to do 2 things differently than in the tutorial.
1. Don’t forget to use the path you chose instead of /home/sfprojects/askeet.
2. When editing httpd.conf we have to use Alias /sf /usr/local/php5/lib/php/data/symfony/web/sf since our Symfony installation is not in the same place as theirs.

Subversion
WHAT? That damn tutorial never said anything about Subversion. Now they just assume I have it installed or access to it or even that I know how to use it. Source control is like seat belts, you’re probably OK never using it, but that one time you need it, it will save your life. I was tempted to just blow this off, but I know it’s important, and in the spirit of learning let’s go for it.

We’ve covered a lot of ground so far, and this was only supposed to take an hour. Now would be a good time to take a break before we tackle the topic of Subversion.

What is Source Control?
Quite simply source control is a way to keep track of different version of files. For example you’re working on project and modify a file. Three days later you you make some more changes. The next day you decide the work you did was crap, and you want to undo all that work, but you you don’t have a copy of that file. You could manually copy files into folders and date them and try to do this all by yourself, but that’s really a waste of time. Besides what happens when 2 or more people are working on the same project, and they both end up making changes to the same file? Something like Subversion, CVS, or even Source Safe really helps manage this problem. Some basic source control commands are make new project, get project files, submit my changes, and compare the differences between my local copy and the remote master copy.

Installing Subversion
Apple doesn’t ship subversion with Mac OS X, and like PPH & PEAR, we could download the source and compile it ourself using the compliers that come with Xcode. But why go through all that when you can just download a package and install it. You can get a package from this page. I downloaded version 1.2.3.

The first Subversion command in the askeet! tutorial is to create a new project.
$ svnadmin create $SVNREP_DIR/askeet
They use $SVNREP_DIR environment variable. Much like $PATH that we discussed earlier, every time you use $SVNREP_DIR it would point you to the root Subversion folder. By default Mac OS X doesn’t have a $SVNREP_DIR variable set. You could either set up a $SVNREP_DIR value just for yourself, or for all users of the workstation. Just add “SVNREP_DIR=/PathToSubversionDirectory” to either ~/.profile or /etc/profile. A good place for the folder is /SVN. Once again, after setting the value, close out of terminal windows and start New Shell window to use the new variable.

Setup the Repository for askeet!
Create a new repository for the askeet project just as the tutorial states.
$ svnadmin create $SVNREP_DIR/askeet
$ svn mkdir -m "layout creation" file:///$SVNREP_DIR/askeet/trunk file:///$SVNREP_DIR/askeet/tags file:///$SVNREP_DIR/askeet/branches

On the next step, remember to go to the directory you used for you project, and not the one the tutorial shows.

The tricky part here is when you get to the part instructing Subversion to ignore the cache and log directories.
$ svn propedit svn:ignore cache opens the default text editor configured for SVN. The default text editor is VIM. I’ve never used VIM before so I had no idea what I was doing. Here’s the 30 second tutorial. You’re in command mode. Hit i to enter editing mode. Type *. Hit esc to go back to command mode. Hit ZZ (that’s shift+z twice) to save the file and quit. You’ll have to do this twice. Once for cache and again for log.

That’s pretty much it. Everything else in the tutorial should work as is.

OK PENCILS DOWN!
The tutorial took me about 3 hours to complete instead of 1. If you followed along, I probably saved you about an hour or more.
All in all, I’ve learned a lot. I was exposed to a few UNIX concepts, a few PEAR concepts, some Apache configuration, some basic Subversion commands, and I even had to use the intimidating VIM for the first time. If your anywhere as overwhelmed as I am by all this you probably need a day or two off from this to let it all sink in.

a little thank you
I’d like to say thanks to Brian Ibbott of Coverville and Michael Butler of The Rock and Roll Geek Show for providing me with some tunes while I was working.

When I started blogging, I promised myself I would never blog about computer programming. I didn’t want to come off like the total dork that I was, and I just figured no one would give a shit. But lately there are 2 large issues looming in my professional career that I just can’t continue to ignore.

1. I haven’t really tried anything new in a long time. I haven’t learned anything through experimentation or discovery in so long. I feel like my skills are becoming obsolete as the technology around me evolves.

2. There are some amazing trends in programming architecture happening that if I choose to ignore them, I’ll be left in the dust.

Specifically, I keep running into this MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm that I know nothing about. I’ve seen it in Cocoa for the Mac, Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other places that seem to be cutting edge and the future of programming. Ruby on Rails struck me as interesting since a big part of the Web development that I do is mundane, repetitive and menial. I really do a lot of copy and paste, and duplicating of code. Ruby on Rails has been getting a lot of attention lately too. So much attention, that there is a bunch of clones for different web languages.
Theres:
Ruby on Rails
PHP on TRAX
ColdFusion on Wheels
and another PHP framework called
Symfony,
and a bunch of others.
I don’t know of something for ASP, but I’m sure it’s out there or on its way.

Symfony and PHP on TRAX caught my attention since they run on top of the rather ubiquitous and free PHP language. At first glance and from what I understand, Symfony seems more mature and extensible.

So I should learn Symfony right?
HELL NO! I’m too damn lazy to struggle with this shit myself without good documentation, and besides with work, who has time. I’ve also never felt that learning something for the sake of learning was practical. If only I was getting to paid to work on a project using Symfony and there was a great book to reference I would do it.

OK, enough dramatic effect.
My coworker Jon Bauer turned me on to this 24 day tutorial called askeet!. Jon says he starting doing the tutorial, and he’s blown away by it. He hasn’t finished, but what he’s learned from the first 2 weeks worth of lessons has been enough for him to start developing an application using Symfony. I think I’ll helping him on this project in the near future as part of my job.

No reason for me not to try it out now. I get a great tutorial. It’s part of my job. I have a partner to learn with and bounce ideas off of.

This diary will be of my experiences in building the askeet! application, but because I’m stubborn, I’m going to do it a bit differently. I’m going to do it all on Mac.

I’m running Mac OS X 10.4.3, and I haven’t installed anything other the the base system. Here’s my story.