PHP 5.3.3 + Ubuntu 8 + Drupal 6

Problem:
Upgrade to the newest PHP (5.3.3) on Ubuntu 8.04. Make sure the instance of Drupal 6.6 works. Drupal 6.6 does not play so nice with PHP 5.3.3.

What not to do?
Don't compile from source unless you know what you're doing. I spent the better part of a day pursuing this, and in the end, I just kept on having to recompile to include this library or that. (curl, mysqli, zlib, etc). Furthermore, when I finally was "ready", none of the config changes from the existing setup were used...I gave up at that point, and went the pre-packaged route.

What to do?
From these pages, I managed to snag the pre-compiled packages for Ubuntu, and make everything go, without too much difficulties
http://www.dotdeb.org/2010/07/25/php-5-3-3-packages-are-available/
http://www.dotdeb.org/2010/07/11/dotdeb-packages-are-now-signed/

This boiled down to basically the following.

---
Add the 5.3.3 packages to dpkg sources
vim /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all
deb-src http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all

---
Add the gpg keys for this repo
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 89DF5277
gpg -a --export 89DF5277 | sudo apt-key add -

---
apt-get update
get a local copy of all of these packages

---
Make a copy of our stuff
cp /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini.9-28
cp /etc/php5/conf.d/imagick.ini /etc/php5/conf.d/imagick.ini.9-28
cp /etc/php5/conf.d/memcache.ini /etc/php5/conf.d/memcache.ini.9-28

---
apt-get install php5
Replace everything when it asks, we'll manually diff and peep the situation...


How to make drupal 6 work with PHP 5.3.3
It all began at http://drupal.org/node/360605...and from there, I utilized the following patches on my drupal instance. I had to rollback a few times with git, so make sure you have a rollback strategy in the event that this doesn't work for you.

curl -O http://drupal.org/files/issues/php53_remove_deprecated.patch
patch -p0 < php53_remove_deprecated.patch
To get rid of ereg deprecation warnings
for php5.3.3 upgrade

From this
http://drup.org/drupal-and-php-53
I was lead to
http://drupal.org/node/360605#comment-2273386
And applied the solution with
curl -O http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal.php53_compat_10-D6.patch
patch -p0 < drupal.php53_compat_10-D6.patch
One hunk was not applied via the patch for me, open closer inspection, it didn't matter. (includes/common.inc.rej ... basically this didn't apply if ($errno & (E_ALL ^ E_DEPRECATED)) {...)

Loopoff

The new nerding flavor of my world is "Loopoff":

Loopoff is a Rails + audio HTML tag + git based audio loop management and archival system

It was written so I could spend less time managing audio files and more time making loops with my Boss RC-50 and RC-20 loop stations.

The app is very unstable at this point, I hope to release something stable-ish/useful for others by the end of the summer.

The git back-end instead of SQL is rocking my world, it stretches the brain in good ways.

Solid.

Magic Table Proof of Concept

A couple months ago, I did some visualization tinkering & proof of concept using a JavaScript visualization tool called Magic Table. I found magic table while browsing the Google Visualization API gallery it's pretty rad.

While working on this I corresponded a bunch with Greg Ross, the developer behind the tool, asking for feature enhancements etc, to which he promptly replied (and/or implemented). He put together this here fine website to explain more about the cool things you can do with it.

I love information dense stuff, magic table is a solid tool to convey a lot in a small amount of space, give it a shot.

101: Github page, Sanction (fork) and SanctionUi

I am a factory of nerdings, github is where most my nerdings go.

Most of me nerdings are Ruby on Rails related.

I'm starting this blog as a place to talk about the various programming nerdings I'm into.
I write today to announce some nerdings I've been wanting to share for a while.

Sanction + Sanction UI

These Rails permissions management plugins have been open sourced and on github for a while, but I'm pretty dang jazzed about them. Props to Matt and Pete for putting together this code initially, it saved me a lot of time and provided a super solid foundation for permissions management stuff with Ruby on Rails.

Booya.