Mark Evans - Web Consultant

Resourceful…Efficient…Productive

Life Priorities - Following your true North

Feb 7

Posted by admin in Life Lessons

Reorganizing my life priorities..

A good friend pointed out to me that I really need to have my own personal compass. What she meant by this, is that you need to be true to yourself, and one of the easiest ways to do this, is to reorganize your  priorities in  life.

I think for the longest time, up until this point actually, my priority list was as follows:

  1. Me - in the sense that it was whatever most benefited me. (Not always of course, but at my weakest moments, i definitely put myself at the center rather than those around me.)
  2. Money
  3. Friends
  4. Family
  5. Relationship

Obviously, this is one messed up list. But I think for me it wasn’t really that obvious.  Or maybe it was, but i was just ignoring the facts.

Well after muling over it for a day i have readjusted my life priorities as follows:

  1. Family
  2. Friends
  3. Relationships
  4. Me
  5. Financial Freedom <- this was money before, but its not really money i want, its just the ability to not have to want for things.

I don’t have God on their yet, because thus far i am still battling where i stand on this factor…To put him in my list at this point would just be a lie…. But i know that if i get him on their,  i know what position he would be at.

Now it’s easy to reorganize a  bullet list… that took all of 5 minutes to realize how big of a mistake i had been making.  The real question comes to how do i implement these changes… how do I make myself a stronger person.

It’s funny, but as i sit here in  bed and write this,  i asked my self… how do i change… the first thing i noticed is that my room  is not the tidiest thing… clothes & towels on the floor books askew. cups and crumbled receipts on my cabinets…   The room itself is in order, but there is just little messes..  It kind of represents my life in that these are the simple little day to day things that don’t take but a few minutes to keep in order and yet..

My gut says that i need to start with getting into a routine, and to me this means start by taking my life priorities and each day prioritizing my tasks by these things. For example:

My family, is the most important thing i have on this earth, and yet i probably treat them the worst. So instead i need to change the way I think about them. Everything i can do w/ them or for them should be a pleasure, not a pain.  So…

Step 1:

Each morning start my day by checking in with the family and see if they need anything or if they could really use my help in some way.

My Friends, i would be lost with out them, and yet I have even pushed many aside or disregarded them and perhaps abandoned them. This needs to change. Additionally i have the “out of site out of mind” factor creep way to deep within my soul and its just wrong.  How do i remember to remember those that are not near me, but are far away.   I don’t want friends to feel used, I want them to feel loved and appreciated. I don’t think that I have really offered them this. Again, i have to be realistic about this, i can’t be having lunch with each friend i have every day either… i might go broke!

Step 2:

  1. Loyalty - This is a big one, and it really comes down to respect. If i truly respect my friends, then i should always keep their interests at heart. I have been keeping my interests at heart with at times complete disregard for others. So from now on each decision will be made with respect to how this affects my loyalties to those i care about.
  2. Honesty - Open and full disclosure. Your true friends can take it and will listen and help you with your problems, so there shouldn’t be  much that you  can’t share with them.
    1. BIG POINT:  If you think that its better to withhold information or if you think that by not saying something about whats going on, that you can make things better… YOUR WRONG. i have attempted this 2 times. Never again, it just makes things worse.
  3. Reconnect - Nothing beats a phone call. So I have made a list of my friends(without priority numbers of course) and each day i am going to call one person o my list.

Relationships, The funny thing about relationships is, that its actually pretty easy to tell if the one you are in is right for you.   But some of us like to live in denial.

Step 3:

Evaluating a relationship 101:

  1. Are your values the same. If not, and you continue to go one… then how strong is your value system… what does this say about your character? You can’t change people, they have to change themselves.
  2. How do they treat their family? How do they treat your family?

Its really that simple. The other stuff takes more time to get through, patience, interests etc. But these top 2 really should be the first cut factors.

Me: For the longest time, me meant what do i want, what would i like to do, me me me. But it really should mean: what would make me a better person, what would improve my health, and then of course just knowing me, and being able to stand up for myself and knowing what i want.  For so long i have been swayed by the opinions of others, often times i question whether or not i even have an opinion. Its amazing how scary it is to not know what you want, and living a life where your concern for the opinion of others allows you to change what you believe on a whim.  I have a feeling that by fixing the first 3 priorities by implementing them actively it will set me on the right path to making better decision for me.

Step 4:

  1. Make time for me. I plan to spend time each day reviewing me and my needs.
    1. My Health - something is wrong… but not sure what, i need to start making the Dr’s orders a priority.
    2. My Opinion
      1. Being informed is one thing.
      2. But making a decision often feels impossible.  I need to really spend more time thinking about the facts rather than the opinions of others and apply the facts to my priority list.

Financial Freedom Getting there is going to take some time, i need to be patient. But mostly i need to learn to balance and organize myself.  I’ll bet that most people that are successful in life are organized and operate in routines. Not to say that i am disorganized, but could sure use some fine tuning.  Additionally i think my greatest strength and weakness is my over-thinking/ analyzing. It typically prevents me from putting one foot in front of the other.

Step 5:

GTD - Getting things Done

  1. Not surprisingly i actually do work rather well off of lists. So OmniFocus has become my new greatest ally.   It allows me to create and organize and really breakdown each project into little steps.
  2. it syncs w/ my phone, laptop and main computer.
  3. The goal is to get all of my life in order, so that i can GTD.
GOD: I can safely say that i am not afraid of at least putting him on my list.  If I am going to make him a part of my life, he is going to have to be number one. I hate putting this last, but its to me still an undecided and its not something that i will blindly jump into…. Funny  i spent kindergarden - middle school going to church.. repeating the verses and the stories… And its not until now that I am really starting to question whether I am going to fit GOD into my life.
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OSX and Apache .htaccess allow mode rewrite

Jan 28

Posted by admin in How To, Website Development

So today i had to get Apache, PHP and Mysql running again on my macbook after installing a new hardrive.

PHP is installed already so thats fine. Mysql a simple download and install.  I stick to the 32 bit for now as it not everything plays nicely w/ the 64 bit. Especially not with Python.

Apache is naturally installed. Just need to turn on/off the internet sharing within the System Preferences Pane.

Then comes the tricky part.

In the http.conf file:   ensure that the line including the ModRewrite module is uncommented.

The line will look like this:

LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so

Then go down to your system directive:

And make it look like this:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
# Order deny,allow
# Deny from all
</Directory>

Also ensure that in the /etc/apache2/users/username.conf file that it looks like:

<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Additionally when defining your Extra Virtual hosts: Make sure to enable all the error logs etc:

ex:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin username@gmail.com
DocumentRoot /Users/username/Sites/my.site.com
ServerName local.site.com
ServerAlias local.site.com
RewriteLog "/Users/username/Sites/logs/my.site.com/rewrite_log"
ErrorLog "/Users/username/Sites/logs/my.site.com/error_log"
CustomLog "/Users/username/Sites/logs/my.site.com/access_log" common
</VirtualHost>

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Friends - Always be open with them

Nov 4

Posted by admin in Life Lessons

Sometimes you get busy, and you have things come into your life. Its very important to let the people you care about know what is going on with you so that they can support you and understand where you are coming from.

Otherwise they are left in the dark, and it can’t lead to anything good.

Tags:

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CakePHP - Override .htacces to ignore directory

Nov 4

Posted by admin in CakePHP

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule    ^manager    -    [L]
RewriteRule    ^pma    -    [L]
RewriteRule    ^fm    -    [L]
RewriteRule    ^$ app/webroot/    [L]
RewriteRule    (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

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Can-Do.org - Virtual Volunteer - Crow Creek Indian Reservation

Oct 15

Posted by admin in Changing the world

Project Crow Creek & Can-DO.org

Bringing accountability and transparency to the Donation industry, we offer the tools to track your generosity from your hands, directly through to the end recipient, with nothing cut out for miscellaneous fees. Together, we can avoid the Donation Black Hole problem perpetuated by many charities. You will not need to wonder about where your money goes, we will show you every step of the way through a trackable, database. And more importantly, you can interact directly with those whose lives you have impacted, and follow their progress.

US Flag worn and weathered.

US Flag worn and weathered.

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Installing Python & mod_python on OS X 10.5 Leopard

Oct 15

Posted by admin in Website Development

Source: http://blog.ultranurd.net/0000/01/28/compiling-django-with-twitter-support-as-a-mac-os-x-universal-binary/#Python

Files:

  1. MySQL 5.1.30
  2. Python 2.6.1
  3. setuptools 0.6c9-py2.6
  4. MySQL-python 1.2.2
  5. Django 1.0.2-final
  6. simplejson 2.0.7
  7. python-twitter 0.5
  8. mod_python 3.3.1

Python

While python.org provides a nice OS X Installer package for 2.6.1, it is compiled as a 32-bit “fat” binary, which doesn’t help us address the Universality problem. We’ll use their script for generating a package as well as installing the framework directly, after some minor changes, courtesy this mailing list post by Ned Deily.

If you’re feeling particularly trustworthy, you can download the disk image containing the Installer package that I built from my website. If not, you can make the changes yourself. Either way, Python.framework will be installed in /Library/Frameworks/.

In the Python 2.6.1 source directory, open the file Mac/BuildScript/build-installer.py in your favorite editor, and make the following changes on lines 1, 65, 68, 71, 633, and 1020:

1c1
< #!/usr/bin/python2.3
---
> #!/usr/bin/python
65c65
< DEPSRC = os.path.expanduser('~/Universal/other-sources')
---
> #DEPSRC = os.path.expanduser('~/Universal/other-sources')
68c68
< SDKPATH = "/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk"
---
> SDKPATH = "/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk"
71c71
< ARCHLIST = ('i386', 'ppc',)
---
> ARCHLIST = ('i386', 'ppc', 'x86_64', 'ppc64')
633c633
< runCommand("%s -C --enable-framework --enable-universalsdk=%s LDFLAGS='-g -L%s/libraries/usr/local/lib' OPT='-g -O3 -I%s/libraries/usr/local/include' 2>&1"%(
---
> runCommand("%s -C --enable-framework --enable-universalsdk=%s --with-universal-archs=all LDFLAGS='-g -L%s/libraries/usr/local/lib' OPT='-g -O3 -I%s/libraries/usr/local/include' 2>&1"%(
1020c1020
< os.environ['MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET'] = ‘10.3′
—
> os.environ['MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET'] = ‘10.5′

You’ll note that some of the changes migrate this script to 10.5 (the hashbang path to Python, the deployment target and SDK version), and some of the changes add support for a Universal binary (adding to the architecture list. It’s possible that some of these changes will be fixed in a future source release of Python 2.6, but I’d guess that most efforts are focused on Python 3.0 at this point.

Once you’ve made the changes, just run the script. You need to be in the BuildScript subdirectory, unless you want to change some of the tmp paths the script uses. This script will do everything, build the framework, download and build any dependencies, install the framework, and generate a disk image. Just sit back and wait!

cd /usr/local/src/Python-2.6.1/Mac/BuildScript/

./build-installer.py

Depending on your shell configuration, you may need to make changes. In my $PATH /usr/local/bin/ trumps /usr/bin/, and I want to keep the Leopard system install of Python 2.5 in place in /System/Library/ and /usr/bin/. Here’s what I did:

cd /usr/local/bin/

for py in `find /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin -name py*`; do ln -s $py; done;

This creates a symlink in /usr/local/bin/ for each of the various just-build Python binaries inside the framework (you’ll not that this is equivalent to the system install). If you run which python now, it should return /usr/local/bin/python. If not, adjust your $PATH as needed in your shell configuration file. This is beyond the scope of this post.

mod_python

Sadly, we end with some pain. Long story short, mod_python relies on apxs (the APache eXtenSion tool, best abbreviation ever) to configure its build, and does not obey any amount of environment variable manipulation to pass in multiple architectures. apxs retrieves useful compiler options, apparently based on the ones used to build your local copy apache… and herein lies the problem. apxs reads those flags from /usr/share/httpd/build/config_vars.mk, and if you inspect that file, you’ll see that there are no CFLAGS or LDFLAGS specified. This is particularly odd, considering that httpd is clearly running as a 64-bit process (according to Activity Monitor), and file reports that all of my other shared objects in /usr/libexec/apache2/ are Universal binaries.

This next bit is my idea, since I couldn’t find any suggestions by googling around. I know perl, so I just read the apxs script to figure out what it was doing, and how it was passing arguments to libtool.

This is probably a terrible idea.

Make a backup of config_vars.mk before adding the four architecture flags to CFLAGS and LDFLAGS on lines 59 and 62:

59c59
< CFLAGS =
---
> CFLAGS = -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64
62c62
< LDFLAGS =
---
> LDFLAGS = -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64

If you run apxs -q CFLAGS or apxs -q LDFLAGS, you’ll see these values, instead of empty strings.

Now just run the standard autoconf procedure to build and  install mod_python.so in /usr/libexec/apache2/:

cd /usr/local/src/mod_python-3.3.1/

./configure

make

cd test

python test.py

cd ..

make

sudo make install

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Key Value Pair Database: Fast Full Text Searches

Aug 23

Posted by admin in Website Development

Store Data for full text searches in key:value pairs.

Tokyo DB

http://www.igvita.com/2009/02/13/tokyo-cabinet-beyond-key-value-store/

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siFR: CSS, Flash & the fonts you love.

Aug 23

Posted by admin in Website Development

A really slick way to have any font you want on your website.

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

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Syncronize, Repositories, Backup, Git, SVN

Jun 15

Posted by admin in Website Development

I have come across some really great places to deal with file backups, syncing, and repository building.

File Syncing:

http://www.samba.org/rsync/

http://www.getdropbox.com

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Repository:

http://git-scm.com/

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Enable mail() PHP, on OSX Leopard

Jun 3

Posted by admin in Uncategorized

I found this here: http://jspr.tndy.me/2008/05/php-mail-and-osx-leopard/ Credit goes to him:

There are 4 files I used for the following:

  • /etc/hostconfig
  • /etc/postfix/main.cf
  • php.ini (this could be anywhere depending on your installation, mine’s in /usr/local/php5/lib/)
  • /var/log/mail.log

firstly, sudo nano -w /etc/hostconfig and add the following line:

MAILSERVER=-YES-

then sudo nano -w /etc/postfix/main.cf, find the myhostname variable (by default it’s host.domain.tld), uncomment it and change it to your domain (if you’re on a machine that doesn’t have a DNS, you can make it a domain that you’re responsible for so that it doesn’t get shut down at the receiving end, but please don’t make it google.com or something like that!)

now, open php.ini and look for the sendmail_path variable, uncomment it, make its value sendmail -t -i, save then restart apache. I’m not really sure if this is 100% necessary as there’s a comment above that says this is the default value anyway, but it can’t hurt!

now open a terminal window and execute the next couple of commands:

% sudo postfix start
% tail -f /var/log/mail.log

finally, create a file called mail.php (or whatever!) and add the following to it:

<?php
mail(
  'you@yourdomain.com', // your email address
  'Test', // email subject
  'This is an email', // email body
  "From: Me <me@mydomain.com>rn" // additional headers
);
?>

obviously replace you@yourdomain.com with your email address and me@mydomain.com with a valid email address (domain at least, as some mail servers will bounce your email if the sender’s domain isn’t real). Now navigate to your mail.php file (likely http://localhost/mail.php) and watch your terminal window to see that it’s been sent successfully. If it hasn’t, let me know if you fixed it and I’ll update this - it’s annoying to me that there isn’t really an answer to this question that I can find so the more comprehensive this is, the more helpful!.

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