I hate !*$#%^ Apple - at times

Well, I’m a “hacker” in the loosest terms, as I will do what it will take to get stuff to work, if it promises to be worthwhile. Wether this be spending untold hours at a command line trying to get crap to compile or writing some creative code to get around an issue that should be simpler than it’s ending up to be.

So to set the scene… I’m trying to plan to get a lot of paperwork done on Sunday… didn’t happen. Namely since I “am” the webmaster for our local community association. I’d been meaning to upgrade the base WordPress install, but have dragged my feet. I figured the third e-mail from the president should ring a few motivational bells and got to it. Mind you… this was supposed to be a hour long project at the most. I ended up finding that I need to reinvigorate my PHP installation on our servers, Mac OS X 10.5.5 ones to be exact, to support GD extensions under PHP 5.2.6. Hah… you’d think that was easy, namely since it was for a plugin to be able to auto-resize photos. Nope… 4.5 hours later I finally got all the crap working (surprisingly, it all was down to installing a TrueType library [t1lib] which tied into FontConfig and then to GD). Now their site is upgraded, but my day has been shot and I’ll be scrambling to try to make up for it this week.

My big question, as to why I also had to hack my own mySQL extension as well into the install, is why doesn’t Apple sell their servers with somewhat functional installs of PHP. Really? I mean, shit… I got these things together in two days and a lot of piecing together Google searches… you’d figure some of their R&D budget would go into somewhere in their plans?

So, as my friends will hear me say it for the first time (although I do it because I was first a FreeBSD weenie) : “Fuck You Apple - and the Jobs you rode in on”

I still like my iPhone tho!