I have to learn to be careful about using the QiuckPost bookmarklet from Movable Type. I think I just sent a Trackback to News.com on an article because I happened to be reading it when I clicked on QuickPost to post about Hurricane Rita. Hopefully they’ll filter it out.

I continue to watch hurricane Rita closely as the projections continue to predict that Rita will come ashore between Port Arthur, Texas and Lake Charles, Lousiana. The biggest town between the two is my home town of Orange, Texas. My entire extended family has evacuated, most of them to Longview, Texas.

I heard this morning that Cameron, Louisiana, which is south of Lake Charles on the coast, is already starting to flood. When I was in seventh grade, we learned that the highest elevation in Orange County (Texas) is thirty feet above sea level. Needless to say, the 15 to 20 foot storm surge that’s predicted could flood most of the county. There is also great fear of secondary flooding. Many forecasts predict that once the hurricane comes inland, it will dump 15 to 30 inches of rain in east Texas and western Louisiana. Much of that rainwater will wind up in reservoirs like Toledo Bend, which forms a good sized chunk of the border between Louisiana and Texas. If they have to open the floodgates on Toledo Bend, flood waters will head down the Sabine River, which runs only a couple of miles away from my parents’ house.

There are lots of things to worry about, but I’m glad that the fates of family members riding out the storm aren’t among them. In the meantime, I have an internal countdown running for each update from the National Hurricane Center.

Dr. Jeff Masters has bad news for my people:

While this is cause for some relief, Rita, like her weaker sister Katrina did, will still bring a Category 5 level storm surge along a 60 – 80 miles stretch of coast to the right of where the storm makes landfall on Saturday. Storm surge heights will peak at 20 – 25 feet in some bays, and bring the ocean inland up to 50 miles from the coast. Large sections of I-10 between Houston and Beaumont will be inundated, and the flood waters will reach the cities of Beaumont, Orange, and Lake Charles. Wind damage will be severe, and Houston can expect a hazardous rain of glass from its high rise building like was experienced during Hurricane Alicia in 1983. If the eye passes just west of Galveston Bay, the storm surge will push 1 – 3 of water into some of Houston’s eastern suburbs, such as Deer Park.

Beaumont, Orange, and Lake Charles are more commonly referred to here as “my old stomping grounds.” I expect that my whole family will be evacuating given this news.

Update: Updates on Rita throughout the day have pointed to an increased likelihood that the eye of the storm will come ashore near the Texas-Louisiana border. My immediate family has evacuated Orange and headed north to Longview. Fortunately traffic along the highways heading north out of Orange was not nearly as bad as the footage we’re seeing from Houston.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has a good post on the role cognitive dissonance has to play in people’s reaction to hurricane Katrina. I am currently fixated on hurricane Rita, which could just as easily hit my home town as anywhere else. When it does come ashore, the good and wicked will be affected alike.

Someone pointed me to Kevin Hemenway’s series of articles on setting up OS X 10.4 for developers over at macdevcenter.com. Here are the articles so far:

• Web Apps with Tiger: Getting Started
• Web Apps with Tiger: Security and MySQL
• Web Apps with Tiger: MediaWiki

After watching Fink try to compile 53,000 packages and reading Kellan’s comment on my previous post, I decided to abandon that approach for getting this laptop set up and go for precompiled stuff instead. Here’s a list of the key packages:

• Subversion client – precompiled binaries are provided by Metissian
• Apache – comes preinstalled, appears to work fine
• PHP – version 4.3.11 comes with OS X, you just need to edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to turn it on
• MySQL – official binaries available

That basically gets everything squared away for doing real development on this computer. I’m not sure why I chose not to follow the path of least resistance in the first place. As I mentioned yesterday, I already have Eclipse up and running, so now the only thing that’s left is Tomcat, which I’ll deal with a bit later.

This is quick document explaining the trials and travails of setting up a Powerbook G4 as a development box with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Java, and Tomcat. After turning on the Powerbook and connecting to my wireless network, the computer automatically downloaded and installed all of the latest and greatest updates from Apple. I proceeded to install Firefox, Adium, Microsoft Office and some other standard productivity applications before turning to my real task — getting my development environment up and running.

I’ve been developing under Windows for years, so getting Java, Eclipse, Tomcat, Apache, PHP, and MySQL installed and running is second nature to me in that environment. I’ve also done the same on plenty of Linux boxes. The Mac is sort of a hybrid of both, and I’m still learning my way around.

I know that the Mac comes with Apache and PHP installed already, but I have no idea where they are or how they work, so I took the advice of some more clueful people and decided to install my own copies. I learned that the best approach here is to used Fink, which is a sort of package manager that makes it “easy” to build or install popular open source software under OS X. Installing Fink and Fink Commander was easy enough. I have always hated the Debian package manager (yes, I know everyone else loves it), but I managed to get MySQL installed without a hitch. I then moved on to Apache, which also installed easily enough.

Things got a bit hairy when I tried to install PHP5, which has about 75 dependencies, and kept whining when I tried to install it. After a few aborted attempts I gave up and tried to install the Subversion client. That failed too, so I installed the binary version of one of the libraries that Fink was complaining about, and after doing so was able to get the SVN client to build (all of the compiling probably took four or five hours).

In the meantime, I installed Eclipse, which was dirt simple. Download and extract the archive, then click on the icon. Everything seemed to work right out of the blocks. I’m a bit disappointed that Eclipse isn’t packaged in an OS X installer, and is currently living in my home directory. The OS X port of Vim was more cooperative. (Although, while I’m a diehard vim-head, I may have to go back to BBEdit or something because the ugly little Vim window looks out of place on a Mac. That never bothered me under Windows.)

When I went back to installing PHP, I found that there was some kind of weird dependency problem. I have autoconf 2.5x installed, and it’s complaining because it can’t remove that install version 2.1x instead. A few attempts to figure out what to do next failed, so I shelved that project temporarily.

I did manage to find the Ruby install on this machine, and run this fix because that seemed like the right thing to do. I then followed some of these instructions to get Rails installed. (I haven’t bothered with FastCGI yet, because WEBrick is fine for my use.)

The following morning: I’m still working on getting PHP installed. My current thought is that some instability was introduced when I switched Fink to use unstable packages and I didn’t update everything. I’m doing that now, and the compile is taking many hours. Judging from the progress bar, many hours still remain. When that’s complete, I’m going to give PHP another shot.

Opera is now giving away their Web browser. The unstated reason is, of course, Firefox.

Looking at Opera’s financial reports, I see that last quarter roughly 80% of their revenue was from their products for “Internet Devices” rather than personal computers. Even without any revenue from the PC version of the browser, the company would still have broken even last quarter. Furthermore, looking at past numbers shows that the share of their revenue coming from mobile phones is only going up. This gives the PC version of Opera a fighting chance at remaining relevant in the face of Firefox’s growing market share and Internet Explorer 7 when it’s released.

Bill Gates on software development:

There’s only really one metric to me for future software development, which is — do you write less code to get the same thing done?

It’s difficult to argue with that. Microsoft developer Mike Champion talks about getting there.

The way I see it, there are two tracks that you can take to less code. One is more and better libraries, and the other is less language and environment overhead. I’d say that the Java ecosystem has a good story to tell in terms of libraries, and not such a good story to tell in terms of overhead. Ruby on Rails, at least so far, seems to succeed in both areas for a pretty large class of applications (though not as large as Java). I’m not sure where .NET falls into the mix. PHP, I’d say, is just OK in terms of libraries, and the amount of overhead varies widely depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Christopher Allbritton says it’s civl war in Iraq, but you can judge for yourself. Here’s a list of conditions that describe a civil war that he supplies:

• A weak central government with incompetent security apparatus.
• Spread of sectarian and ethnic killings.
• Existence of armed sectarian and ethnic militias.
• High threat perception among the sectarian and ethnic groups of the country.
• Insistence of each group on its demands.
• Foreign interference and support to feuding groups.

It’s hard to argue that Iraq fails to meet any of those conditions.