Mike Cohen

MAMP vs standard Apache/PHP/MySQL installation

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Since Chris24 twittered that he hates MAMP, I had to come to MAMP’s defense.

For a long time I never saw any reason to use MAMP, since I used the standard system installation of Apache & PHP with MySQL installed via mysql.com’s installer package. After using MAMP for a while I came to appreciate it and I finally upgraded to MAMP Pro.

With MAMP or MAMP Pro, you can start Apache only when you need it, rather than having it run all the time and waste memory. MAMP’s bundled version of Apache also takes less virtual memory than the standard 64-bit version.

MAMP PRO 1
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One of the major advantages of MAMP over the system standard Apache/PHP setup is that it lets you easily switch between PHP 4 & 5 and enable Zend Optimizer with eAccelerator or XCache.

MAMP PRO 3
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MAMP Pro also gives you a nice user interface for enabling & disabling Apache modules.

MAMP PRO 2
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links for 2008-05-27

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FriendFeed's room for improvement

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FriendFeed has become very popular lately, in part due to Twitter’s unreliability. FriendFeed still can’t replace Twitter, since it can’t be accessed via SMS or IM, although FriendFeed can be more conversational, since you can comment on a particular item rather than just reply to the user as you do on Twitter.

A few days ago, FriendFeed added rooms, a good idea although it still seems a bit rough around the edges. The big limitation of rooms is that there’s no way to see a list of rooms or find a particular room unless you know the name, although Andy Beard found a way to find rooms through Google.

The API seems to be lacking some features needed to fully support rooms. In particular, it isn’t possible to get all rooms a user belongs to. You also can’t get messages from multiple rooms. I’m sure they’ll continue to refine this feature.

I’m trying to decide how to add room support to my FriendFeed iPhone app without making it too cluttered. I’d welcome feedback & suggestions on how the application can be improved.

Trust the focus indicator

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I’ve been working on my manual focus skills with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. I found that trusting the focus indicator light in the view finder is the key to proper focus. The subject will appear to be in focus across a range of settings, but it’s only in perfect focus when the indicator lights up. In order for it to work properly, it’s necessary for the subject to be in the proper focus area (which has a red indicator when you press the shutter halfway).

Frilly Hibiscus

Nightmare Ticket

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There have been suggestions that Obama should choose Hillary as vice president for a ‘Dream Ticket’. It would actually be more of a nightmare. Clinton would be constantly defying Obama, making deals behind his back, and in effect running her own parallel government. She’s much too outspoken to remain in the background. Edwards would probably be his best choice.

APIs should be free & open

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Many websites which provide an API require developers to register and request a key, while others like Twitter and FriendFeed are completely open. Flickery, a new desktop client for Flickr, demonstrats why restricted APIs are bad. Flickr decided to revoke the developer’s API key because it was causing too much traffic, causing the Flickery application to stop working.

Requiring developers to sign up for a key before they start developing applications for a website will stifle development and make it less likely that we’ll see new and innovative applications. Twitter has maybe hundreds of third party applications thanks to their open API, while Pownce, which requires a key (even though it’s quick & free to sign up), has very few.