WARNING! Your environment specifies an invalid locale.
This can affect your user experience significantly, including the
ability to manage packages.

And when running some apt-get commands I got this:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
	LANGUAGE = (unset),
	LC_ALL = (unset),
	LC_CTYPE = "de_DE.UTF-8",
	LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory

There are plenty of supposed solutions out there but none worked for me but this one:

# add this line to /etc/environment; then reboot
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

I’m going to use rbenv and ruby-build in the progress. This way everything is installed in ~/.rbenv and you won’t need any administrator privileges.

1. Install Xcode 4.3 or the new stand-alone command line tools
2. Install rbenv and ruby-build

   # install rbenv
   $ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
   $ echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> .bash_profile
   $ echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> .bash_profile
   # You may be using Zsh or any other shell.
   # I presume you know how to adopt the previous two lines then.
   
   # install ruby-build
   $ mkdir -p ~/.rbenv/plugins
   $ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
   
   # reload bash (alternatively close and re-open Terminal)
   $ source ~/.bash_profile
   

3. Compile Ruby 1.9.3-p125 and make default ruby

   $ env CC=/usr/bin/gcc rbenv install 1.9.3-p125
   $ rbenv global 1.9.3-p125
   $ rbenv rehash
   

4. Done. Check everything is ok now

   $ ruby -v
   # => ruby 1.9.3p125 (2012-02-16 revision 34643) [x86_64-darwin11.3.0]
   

Sweet. Leave a note in the comments if this helped you. Happy coding!

Der Facebook-Erfinder von Görlitz

Gestern hat die Sächsischen Zeitung einen Artikel mit der Überschrift “Der Facebook-Erfinder von Görlitz” veröffentlicht. Der Beitrag beschreibt meinen Werdegang vom Erfinder des Görlitzer Netwerkes the-reality.net vor 8 Jahren bis hin zu einem Ausblick in die Zukunft. Sehr lesenswert! Vielen Dank an Frank Seibel für das nette Interview und Wolfgang Wittchen für die hervorragenden Fotos!

Link zum vollen Artikel: Schöne neue Neiße-Welt

XAMPP for OS X hasn’t seen any updates in quite a while so I decided to go with MAMP after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion (10.7.2 as of now). Quite ironic since I originally changed from MAMP to XAMPP because of the lack of updates from MAMP. However, both are quite similar when it comes to installing extensions from pecl or pear so you may have some luck applying the following steps to either dev environment.

Also while I am installing the mongo driver for php here, the very same steps should work for other pecl packages such as memcache, uploadprogress or xdebug. So let’s get started!

Prerequisites:

• Install XCode (I’m on 4.2 at the moment)
• Install MAMP (2.0.5)

1. $ brew install mongodb

2. Start the MongoDB server

   $ mongod

Now it’s time to install the mongo php extension:

1. Download the matching version of the php source code from php.net (MAMP 2.0.5 comes with PHP 5.3.6)
2. Create an include-folder in your MAMP php installation

   $ mkdir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include

3. Extract the php source code into that new folder. The extracted folder is called php-5.3.6.
4. Rename that folder to just php, then the php source code should be located here:

   /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php

5. Change into that directory and configure php:

   $ cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/php

   $ ./configure

6. MAMP comes with a weird pear config file that causes issues, let’s remove it:

   $ rm /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/pear.conf

7. Now install the mongo driver with pecl:

   $ cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/bin

   $ ./pecl install mongo

8. Activate the extension in your php.ini:

   extension=mongo.so

And that’s all. From now on you only need the last two steps to install other extensions.

To deal with file uploads, most developers seem to use Amazon S3 these days, so did I. Surely it’s a great service that pretty much just works, but with increasing traffic on comemories I started to feel a little uncomfortable about the way Amazon charges me. Basically they let a month pass and then sum up how much storage I use, how much traffic I used and how many API calls my app did.

So far so good, but what if my app sees some tremendous success suddenly and many more people upload photos than I anticipated? S3 would scale just fine and handle all the traffic with no issues at all… And by the end of the month I would get the big surprise in form of a credit card bill.

Of course it depends a lot on what you are trying to do, but if you are anything like me and you are running a web service more or less for fun and because you are learning about technology, you should really reconsider if S3 is the right choice.

Let’s have a look at their pricing for a little example application:

Image we run a web service with 10.000 users who uploaded 100 photo each at 5MB per photo. This would sum up at about 5TB of storage needed.

• Amazon charges $0.14 per GB for the first TB leading to $140
• then the other 4TB cost $0.125 per GB summing up at +$500
• every image has to be transferred in once: +$500
• and for simplicity let’s say every images is transferred out once: +$750

A total of $1890 for the month the images are uploaded. Now let’s imagine no more photos are uploaded from this point on but every photo is accessed once per month again. This means we would keep paying $1390 month to month.

Wow! 5TB is not even that much. You could buy three 2TB HDDs for 210€ altogether to get 6TB of storage and this would only be a one time cost instead of monthly charges. But ok, just buying plain HDDs is not really comparable to the service Amazon offers. But what about rented dedicated servers?

Hetzner Online offers the EQ9 for 99€ per month and the server has 4500GB storage installed. Coming to 0.022€ per GB. So I could just get two of them and have 9TB storage for less than 200€ per month. Now Amazon offers some redundancy. So let’s just get 4 of those servers and have everything stored twice. Voilà, redundant storage for under 400€ per month.

Let’s not forget that we actually have 4 powerful machines here with Core i7 and 12GB of RAM each! Those make some pretty good app servers too. If we ran this on Amazon EC2 instead, it would cost us another fortune.

Don’t get me wrong here. I know getting a bunch of dedicated servers is no cool and fancy cloud with unlimited automatic scaling capabilities and also requires quite a bit of operations know how and work, but for web applications of small to medium size with just 1-2 people working on them this may just be the better solution. Big enterprises on the other hand could see some benefits from outsourcing all storage worries to a over-priced 3rd party. But really, who can count themselves to those?

Most notably is my stay with thoughtbot, inc. last summer, which I’ll lose a few words about as well as projects I have worked on lately.

One of the reasons I didn’t post anything in the last months was from technical nature. I wasn’t happy with the article layout and syntax highlighting of the blog as well as the URL schema of my whole site. This is all fixed up now and I feel ready to post something new.

uninitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes

The mysql gem is installed but got compiled for a wrong architecture for some reason. I’m not 100% sure when this happens but if you run into the problem uninstall the mysql gem

$ sudo gem uninstall mysql

and reinstall it with this flag

$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql

if you are using rvm you can skip the “sudo” on all commands.

I choose to speak about some funny and interesting stories from my social network the-reality.net to give people a little understanding of whats happening behind the walls of social networks. My talk is in German, so if you understand a little German have a look!

Moscone West WWDC10 at night

Wow. That was a great week! It’s been roughly a month since I went to San Francisco to attend Apples Worldwide Developers Conference 2010, going down in Moscone West from June 7 to June 11.

I flew into San Francisco on Friday, June 4th and had a nice look around the city at the weekend before getting into WWDC on Monday. WWDC started off with a keynote by Steve Jobs. Doors opened on Monday morning at 7am, full 3 hours before the Keynote kicked off. So I thought getting there right at 7 would be fine. But people are actually more mad about seeing Steve Jobs than 15 years old girls for Tokio Hotel. They must have been queueing all night to get in first. At the time I got there, there was a full queue around the Moscone West building. Everyone was playing nice and queued up. The atmosphere was really welcoming and friendly. Since I was on my own I got lucky and could enter the building quite early and ended up getting a seat in the very front of the Presidio room where the keynote happened. It was a great experience to attend a Ketnote for real once. Basically you can feel how excited everyone in that room is, which is a very unique atmosphere for a press event.

After the keynote a busy week full of great sessions started. They are all covered by the developer NDA so I can’t really write much about them. But I can say that I saw and learned some really neat things about HTML5!

After WWDC I had one more day in San Francisco which I used to visit Alcatraz and the SF Bay Aquarium. Then I flew back on Sunday where I met a few another German iOS developers who where on the same flight back to Munich.

XAMPP is great for development in a local environment but does not come with a php memcached extension preinstalled. Since there are 2 good memcached php extensions in the PECL repository (memcached and memcache) it could be as easy as installing them through XAMPPs PECL installer. Unfortunately XAMPP for Mac (1.7.3) is still compiled for 32bit and the PECL installer would create a 64bit snow leopard extension. So let’s do it manually by setting some 32bit flags…

Install memcache PHP extension (2.2.5) for XAMPP (1.7.3) under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (10.6.2)

1. make sure Apple Developer Tools (Xcode) are installed
2. make sure XAMPP Developer Package is installed

3. $ cd /tmp

4. $ pecl download memcache

5. $ tar xzf memcache-2.2.5.tgz

6. $ cd memcache-2.2.5

7. $ /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/phpize-5.3.1

8. This line looks just a bit complicated because it tries to deal with architecture problems between XAMPP (compiled for 32bit) and Snow Leopard (compiles everything by default to 64bit)

   $ MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64' CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' ./configure --with-php-config=/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/bin/php-config-5.3.1

9. $ make

10. $ sudo make install

11. change XAMPPs php.ini to load the extension: (in [Dynamic Extensions])

    extension=memcache.so

Those steps enable you to use memcached in your PHP Code. But to actually test the application and caching in your local development environment you have to start the memcached daemon. Fortunately memcached got already installed by the Mac OS X Developer Tools (Xcode).

Just go ahead and start the memcached daemon:

$ memcached -m 8 -l 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 -d

-m 8 limits memcached to use a maximum of 8MB RAM to operate

-l 127.0.0.1 -p 11211 is the ip and port to listen on

-d tells it to start as a daemon

(instead of -l and -p you can also use -s to use an unix domain socket)