Category — Tech Talk

I recently shifted my entire development environment for my personal / family business websites to the Mac.  In case you can’t tell, I am a Mac convert.

It took a little digging to figure out how to do all the things that I needed to get everything working.  It’s all out there, but I figured I’d write up a short tutorial on how to do it all.   If nothing else, I can refer to it the next time I need to set all this up.

Here are the main steps to get MAMP (Mac OS X LAMP) setup and running on your Mac.  I will elaborate on each in a subsequent post.

1. Download and install the MAMP environment – don’t get cute with it, install it in the Applications folder like it says.
2. Edit your /Applications/MAMP/conf/httpd.conf file to add your virtual hosts, so you can develop multiple sites on your computer.
3. Edit your /etc/hosts file to define your virtual hosts as well.
4. Install any PEAR modules you may need.
5. Change MAMP to use the default ports (I highly recommend this).
6. Install any MySQL client tools you need to do your development work.

That’s it!  My subsequent posts will explain the details behind each step.

Ok, so the new hard drives arrived.  Two gloriously bubble wrapped 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives from NewEgg.com.  Now, I have heard some complaints about their shipping, and about these drives – so I upgraded to FedEx shipping and both my drives seem to working flawlessly.  Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook pro is perhaps the easiest drive install I’ve ever done.  Just four screws for the caddy, and the rest was without tools and painless.

I have decided (since I already did a Logic install) that I will leave the “vanilla” logic install, including Jam Packs and all that jazz, on the 320Gb system drive.  After all it’s on the same SATA controller as the other drives anyway.  Henceforth, however, all samples, content, instruments, etc. will go on the Media Library drive – the new Barracuda.

All my project data goes on the other Barracuda.

It’s taking about three hours to copy over my 200gb+ of samples and instruments, but I am sure this is primarily because of the speed of the USB 2.0 external drive I am copying from.

Oh, as an aside, my MacMini is now my “main” computer – dunno what I am going to do with all those PCs I’ve accumulated.  I went ahead and purchased the elgato Turbo.264 and have to say that I LOVE it.  Whereas before if I was encoding a DVD to AppleTV, I could basically do nothing on my mini, now I can read email, even watch another video, while encoding.  And the quality is great.  I highly recommend this product.

More to come when the memory arrives, I load up a lot of instruments, and we try this rig out.

Well, I just ruined my Christmas and birthday for the next two years!  I had to agree that I wouldn’t buy another computer until after 2010 to get it, but I finally broke down and bought a new MacPro – and holy cow does it rock!

I bought the base  (if you can call an eight Xeon system base) entry-level 8-way MacPro – upgrading to better CPUs, etc. just didnt’ seem worth the expense.

However, I went ahead and purchased a few extras to configure this machine as a truly “one stop shop” for all my music production needs – I’ll discuss my final configuration in a bit.

Out of the box, this thing looks and performs awesome!  I did a couple of tests with it, one a DVD to H264 conversion, the other a Logic project performance test.  Both were somewhat subjective, but here’s what I found:

• The DVD conversion process was about 10x faster than on my MacBook (my MacBook is a Core Duo, not Core 2 – but 10x is pretty amazing) – took about 12 minutes!
• The music test was much more subjective – however, anyone that’s done any Logic’ing on an older MacBook probably gets this.  On my MacBook, I had a 24 track project with a few plug-ins, using an Apogee Duet, A Powercore Firewire, and a Focusrite LiquidMix.  Sometimes, starting up a project I would get system overload errors, disk speed errors, etc. and couldn’t get it to play.  Usually, playing it over and over it would eventually cache (I think) enough info that I could mix the session.  With the MacPro?  Let’s just say that even running most of my audio data off a USB2.0 drive (leaving the Firewire bus for audio I/O and the Powercore and LiquidMix), I was able to launch my test project flawlessly, it never burped at all and the CPU monitors (yes, all EIGHT of them) didn’t even register that anything was going on!

My current config is that I have a 320Gb OS drive, and all my music files are stored on two external USB2.0 drives – one for my project files, and one for audio files and virtual instruments.  I found that even on the MacPro, it’s better not to do disk I/O on the same bus as audio I/O – I always seem to get noise of some kind at some point.  Separating out the disk I/O from the audio I/O and plug-in processing seems to fix any problems.  I am runnin 2Gb of memory.

However, here’s how it will look soon:

• - (8) 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU
• 10Gb memory
• 320Gb system / OS drive
• 1.5TB project drive
• 1.5TB virtual instrument / sample drive

The drives are all 3GB/s SATA drives hosted right in the computer – NewEgg had a screaming deal on 1.5TB Seagates ($189!) that I couldn’t pass up.  Now, I won’t need to use ANY USB2.0 while doing music production.  I will use my existing external drives as backup drives for the internal drives – so nothing’s wasted.  I don’t need RAID – it’s probably overkill – but at some point if I needed even more performance I would trick it out with a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) option – but I doubt I will need to.  This still leaves me with an empty internal bay as well.

Can’t wait to get it all configured this way, I expect I will be able to run virtually unlimited tracks / plug-ins, etc.  Plus, if I run out of CPU room, I can always use my MacBook as a LogicNode!

Like many folks with a software background, I’ve developed a few frameworks in my day.  My most recent framework, which I developed for LAMP sites, was the basis for Motosport’s current platform and several of eBags’ marketing websites (though not the main site).  Called iSkins, it was lean, mean and effective.  And I could whip up a marketing site in a day and a commerce site in a few days using it.

But like any other person whose day job is NOT developing frameworks, who has a small child at home and a lake house to take care of on the weekends, it was time to look elsewhere when asked to evaluate frameworks for a new in-house application we are developing here at Enexity.

Enter symfony!  Wow, what a great platform.  Every time I look for a feature that I had in iSkins, it’s there.  But it’s usually better thought out, more extensible, has a way better OO model and generally kicks the crud out of what I developed.

Symfony (from their website) is:

“…a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5.

It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise…”

 Some of the advantages of symfony, as I see them, include:

• good object model
• MVC separation
• caching
• scaffolding
• Ajax
• ORM
• database abstraction
• a solid plugin architecture
• localization and internationalization
• the admin generator (WOW)
• the routing system
• form development and validation
• debugging

That’s a lot of strengths!

The one big weakness I see is the learning curve – the online symfony book is great, and there are lots of good tutorials floating around, but it’s still one heck of a big framework.

I intend, time willing, to someday write about how I came up to speed on the framework.  Instead of diving in to ORM and CRUD like many of the tutorials want you to do, I started with the site layout so I could understand the DNRY possibilities in the view layer.  In this manner, I was able to really learn about all the parts of the architecture without worry about some of the more esoteric matters – and, when I finally started doing “real” work with it, it looked nice right out of the gate.

Although the project we’re working on won’t be publicly available anytime soon, when I find time I just might upgrade devineville.com, parkeranne.com and a few other sites to symfony.

Ok, so I know they had a well publicized outage last week, but I finally converted my company over to the free version of google apps.  Shared calendar, great email with awesome spam protection, and it’s free.  We’re not an internet company, so having a nice partner like google to “get our back” on a mission critical service (as opposed to paying a ton for it with perhaps not even as much reliability) was a great deal.

 Love it.  Google rocks.

Man, I hate spam.  I have an email address that I’ve had for more than ten years, and I would say that 99% of all the email I receive is spam (maybe more).  Of course, I have some programs for filtering out spam, and I have tried them all – white lists, black lists, bayesian, you name it. 

None of them work to my satisfaction.

So, I was dabbling with some of the settings on my gmail account the other day and was musing – “Wouldn’t it be great if google offered their spam filtering technology as an add-on to Thunderbird or even Outlook?”  Realizing the latter would likely never happen, it came to me – google lets me use gmail to check other accounts, and allows POP/IMAP access, so in fact you can use it to filter email, just not the way I thought.

So, I setup google to check my main email account, then setup Thunderbird to check google.  WHAM-O!  I’m in.  What’s even cooler is I can use gmail when I am on the road to check my email account, and not worry about syncing email between my home client and some other account, etc.  I love it!

 Things got a bit squirrely trying to get the authentication setup (you’ve switched over to having google check your account, then they send a verficiation email, and you have to respond to it – but where?  in google?  in your old client?).  Anyway, after getting through that I haven’t received ONE SPAM in days.  Amazing.  And since gmail can check up to five accounts, I have been able to centralize all of my accounts now into one account, it’s super cool.

 Thanks google, you rock!