As a trekkie who grew up with TNG and loves every single Star Trek series, I really hated JJ Abram’s Star Trek movie. It doesn’t have anything to do with Star Trek and imo it even fails as an action movie, or scifi movie, … it just fails. hard.

Being an optimist, I told myself: “The next Star Trek movie’s gonna be good … now that the characters are set up, J.J. Abrams can focus on a good story”. Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I kinda lost that hope – it just looks like the same superficial action flick that was Star Trek 2009.

But I’m not here to tell you what to think. I just wanna whine about stuff on the interwebs

Today, YouTube user CooperPress uploaded a video explaining notch’s code – especially how he generates the textures on the fly.

MAMP 2.1.1 on Mac OS X 10.7
GraphicsMagick 1.3.17 (installed via macports)

Problem

Invoking GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick via PHP’s system commands (system, exec, etc.) does not work – depending on your error reporting settings, there will either be no output at all or something along these lines:

Command output: “dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/local/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib
Reason: Incompatible library version: convert requires version 16.0.0 or later, but libfreetype.6.dylib provides version 15.0.0″

Solution

MAMP is bundled with an outdated version of libfreetype (15.0.0). Luckily, Mac OS X already ships with the latest version – we just have to instruct MAMP not to use its bundled version:

1. 1. Open up the following file: /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/envvars
2. 2. Add a ‘#’ to the last line, so it reads: #export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

I hope it helps

Note: I assume, you have read the official How to use the Blob service from PHP tutorial and managed to set up a connection to your Azure Blob storage.

azure_api.php

<?php

require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

use WindowsAzure\Common\ServicesBuilder;
use WindowsAzure\Common\ServiceException;

class AzureAPI {

    function __construct($connectionString) {

        $this->blobRestProxy = ServicesBuilder::getInstance()->createBlobService($connectionString);
    }

    function renameBlob($source_container, $source_name, $destination_container, $destination_name) {

        try {

            $this->blobRestProxy->copyBlob($destination_container, $destination_name, $source_container, $source_name);

            $this->blobRestProxy->deleteBlob($source_container, $source_name);
        }

        catch(ServiceException $e) {

            die($e->getMessage());
        }

        return true;
    }

}

Example usage

<?php

require_once 'azure_api.php';

$connectionString = ''; // Your connection string (DefaultEndpointsProtocol=[http|https];AccountName=[yourAccount];AccountKey=[yourKey])

$azure = new AzureAPI($connectionString);

$azure->renameBlob('foo', 'bar', 'assets', 'archived'); // move blob 'bar' from container 'assets' to 'bar' in container 'archived'