I recently got a MacBook Pro and enabled its PHP compilation. It was smooth and easy. Opened some PHP pages and was delighted about the speed. Then I tried one of my music scripts I use to compile MIDI files from math algorithms. An ugly error message appeared reporting an undefined function call in line six of my script. Hell! My nice new install couldn’t handle something in my script! Opened TextWrangler and found bcscale() called 0n line six. Read up on PHP’s BCMath library and learned that while it comes bundled with PHP, it must be enabled during compilation. Looked at phpinfo() and faced the sobering fact that the Applers had not included much in the PHP compilation that ships with Leopard.Then I visited entropy.ch and learned that Marc had not yet finished a stable PHP 5.2.5 package for Leopard. After some hours of reading through the forums I was ready to try and install Marc Liyanage’s Beta 6 package. It took a while to get it all right, but after some not so terrible struggle I was up and running with PHP 5.2.5 on Apache 2.2. I was pleased to look at a much longer list of included modules and libraries than what the Applers had offered. And best of all, my music scripts were functioning fast and dependably.
Apparently, but here is an mp3 instead. This file was originally a MIDI sequence generated by a recursive trigonometric function. The sample consists of the first 300 values out of an infinite series of notes that can be generated by the algorithm. tango58
Since therein is nonexistence on account of dearness.
Sweat…
Just finished upgrading without first reading all the fine print. And of course, I got all those “headers already sent” PHP warnings. I had to delete some new-line characters in my wp-config.php. It now seems to work. Or… ?
Perhaps some samples would be nice. Let’ see whether I can post something here. Listen to demonitude:
This little test sentence was produced entirely in Repeat After Me. I used rogue amoeba’s excellent Audio Hijack Pro software to capture the output. The phrase is inspired by the ramblings of a savior-of-the-world type Indian Swami man.
Don’t know how much of a bug this is, but it sure is annoying.
I converted some data into a delimited file format and read it into Excel. No problem with that. Some fields were quite large. For the large fields the xls file cells showed #######, but when I viewed the cells the correct content was displayed. When I export the xsl file as csv, the ####### fields really became just that: lots of hash. It took me a while to figure out that there was a system to the madness: all fields with more than 255 and less than 1024 bytes got filled with hash signs. What an odd behavior. Both smaller and larger fields remained in tact.
Canon EOS 350D Digital
Shutter Speed 1/400 sec
Focal Length 60.0 mm
Apperture Value f/4.0 
After installing Apple’s Developer Tools the Speak After Me application is found under: /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Speech/Repeat After Me.app
It does start on the intel iMac, but it can’t record. In fact, it does record, but it can’t save the recording, nor does it transfer the recoded audio to the recording pane. The problem has already been mentioned in this Wikipedia entry: “On Intel-based computers, the sound recording feature does not function.”
To make things worse, it seems like not only does recording not work on Intel Macs, the attach file feature doesn’t work either! When I try to attach a file, even if it is a 16-bit uncompressed AIFF file, Repeat After Me cannot attach the file and throws a popup message: “Error while parsing sound file. Please make sure that your sound file format is supported. Repeat After Me supports 16-bit uncompressed AIFF sound files only.”
Not good. Apple nowhere informs about this.
I recently installed PHP 5.1.4 on my Mac. It went quite smoothly. At first I had the Mac’s own PHP (4.4.something) up and running. After turning it off PHP 5 was all ready to go.
Not spectacular, down the railing of the balcony, sounded like a motorcycle but it was Valentin driving along with his chick in a certain red Honda Civic. This is alright. No lack of sun. A slight headache. And no clue how to end this. I think I lost access to reality as we knew it. Never mind. It could have been worse.
The transitions between the images were too smooth. It suggests connections. I am sure there are none. How will I sort out my thoughts and feelings? Perhaps the wind moves things in meaningful wavy ways? There must be a way to solve this puzzle.
