JellyStyle

A little preview of a project I’m helping launch soon....

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:39:00 +1000

A little preview of a project I’m helping launch soon. These two – Melissa Savage and Katie Molloy – love discussing movies, and soon they’ll be reviewing them regularly for your listening pleasure on a new podcast: Silver Screen Queens.

Sketched traditionally, inked and coloured digitally in Photoshop CS6. The credits block is mostly random references to various fandoms, although Katie’s cat, Puck, gets a little mention in there.

Earlier this year, I was involved in putting together a project...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:42:00 +1000

Earlier this year, I was involved in putting together a project featuring the amazing Amanda Thorson (pictured). I’m no longer involved, but I had all but finished up artwork for the project, so I thought I’d finish it up as a portfolio piece.

I did an initial sketch in a notebook I keep on me, and after transferring that to Photoshop, I re-sketched, inked, flatted and shaded the illustration there.

If and when this project is launched, please give Amanda your full support. She 100% deserves it.

JELLY GETS POLITICAL ALSO DINOSAURS

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:27:42 +1100

Here in Australia, we’re in the lead up to an election that will occur at the end of the year. It’s a fierce showdown where Labor and Liberal go head to head for the coveted title of Prom Queen, and isn’t complete without a bunch of Greens hanging out in the corner and spiking the punch.

Now, I’m not one to get political. My wife - and pretty much anyone who’s seen my tweets during elections and political events - can tell you that the whole ordeal frustrates me no end. For the first time in a very long time, I’m getting some of the same frustration from the more political people that surround me. People who are frustrated with the way this government is being run and who are sincerely considering voting differently in the approaching election.

With that being said, I would like to offer up a candidate who I think would serve everyone’s interest fairly.

T-Rex.

He speaks to God…

For the Christian demographic out there that desires a Godly leader for our country’s government. Who better than a dinosaur that speaks to God on a regular basis?

He discusses video games with the devil…

Yeah, T-Rex is into video games, and the Devil likes to talk to him about them. This is a guy that geeks everywhere can get behind.

He knows how to resolve religious differences…

BAM! Our country could probably use a bit of this action.

He’s into equality…

He has a gay pal and is totally cool with it. Pretty sure that’s how political people quantify this right? NO SERIOUSLY AM I RIGHT OR WHAT

He has some interesting views on gun control…

This isn’t really something we’re dealing with here right now, but it’s a crucial issue, and a good candidate weighs in on ALL the issues.

His actions represent the people…

Or at least the readers of the comic… when a choose your own adventure strip comes to town!

He’s able to admit that he has flaws…

Because sometimes you’ve just need to look in the mirror and say “That, my friend, is someone with some friggin’ FLAWS.”

Several days later…

Look there’s more, I guess, but I kinda got sucked into and subsequently lost in the archives, and it’s probably a good idea that I go and have a shower now. Uh… vote 1 T-Rex?

Dinosaur Comics is written by Ryan North, which is coincidental because it’s my favourite webcomic and he’s my favourite author. I met him one time and he’s both enormous and also he complemented the Nintendo wallet and my accent. What a guy, amirite? He wrote a book that is coming out soon and it was even turned into possibly the first adventure-of-your-own-choosing, live-performed-on-the-internet play ever. I would call that a win.

The Mobile Couch artwork got featured on the Pocket Casts 4...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:00:22 +1100

The Mobile Couch artwork got featured on the Pocket Casts 4 announcement! http://jellystyle.com/s/mD (at Swell HQ)

First picture hung! (at Casa de Jelly)

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 13:27:25 +1100

First picture hung! (at Casa de Jelly)

The Podcast Empire Stikes Back

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:18:48 +1100

So a few months ago I launched my first podcast, Jelly and Bean. Earlier this month I recruited another, Wez Wanders. Today, I launched the third: Mobile Couch. Let me tell you all a little about them.

Jelly and Bean is a podcast about geek stuff. Every Friday, my co-host Branden Maynes and I discuss news about television, movies, games and technology (or anything else we’re interested in, really). We’ve just done our tenth episode and have a great year planned for 2013, including a couple of specials.

Wez Wanders is a fortnightly podcast about travel, hosted by the wonderfully bearded Nathan Brown of the Wez Wanders blog. He talks about travel related news, travel photography and provides handy tips about travelling, and every now and then he throws in an interview with a pal, just to keep things fresh.

The newest podcast in my empire is Mobile Couch, a podcast hosted by Caleb Thorson, Jake MacMullin and myself that deals mostly with development of mobile apps for the iOS platform. The first episode went live today, and despite starting out a little off-topic, provided some great suggestions on starting new development projects. If you’ve ever thought about creating your own app for iOS, then this is a great podcast to listen to, as we’ll be discussing everything from actual development, to designing apps, and right down to dealing with the business side of things. It’s set to be a great show.

I have a number of other plans for new podcasts, and I’m always interested to hear ideas for new shows if you have them. I hope you guys will join me as I expand into new areas and launch this little podcast empire of mine. I promise I won’t build any Death Stars or anything.

Sweet cheeseburgers… what the heck am I up to now? (at...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:21:53 +1100

Sweet cheeseburgers… what the heck am I up to now? (at Swell HQ)

Installing PHP Extensions with MAMP

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 17:48:55 +1100

This last weekend, I decided to knuckle down and build an OAuth server in PHP. One thing that had kept me from doing it until now was that I didn’t have the required extension installed in my development environment.

My development environment is MAMP (not the PRO version), which I’m running on OS X Mountain Lion. The combination made it a little more difficult to install extensions than I would have liked (though I am a bit of a command line n00b, so I guess there’s that).

So both to assist those who come after me, and also to remind me when I have to go through this again, here’s what I did.

Install Command Line Tools

First up we need to install the Command Line Tools that usually come with Xcode. Regardless of whatever that previous sentence will have you believe, you don’t actually require Xcode to install them.

If you have Xcode, installation is as simple as opening up Xcode, going into the Downloads pane of the Preferences, selecting components and installing “Command Line Tools”. It’ll take a couple of minutes or whatever, but then it’s done. BOOM. Close Xcode and move on to the next step.

If you don’t have Xcode, you first need to download the tools from the Downloads for Apple Developers page (you’ll need to register as an Apple Developer if you haven’t already). Find the latest version of Command Line Tools for your version of OS X on that page and download them. Once it’s done, open up the disk image and run the installer package.

Additional Tools

There are a few tools that we need which aren’t included in Apple’s little package. Fortunately, I managed to find a blog post that included a useful script which does all the heavy lifting. I took that and turned it into a shell script that you can run with terminal.

Download the script from GitHub, then unzip it and move it into your home folder. Open terminal and then simply run the following command (you might need to type in an administrator’s password at some stage):

sh ~/cltools.sh

This will download and install all the tools included in the script. Once it’s done Terminal will display “Installation complete.” and throw you a new command prompt.

Once it’s done check the last few lines that have printed to the Terminal window. If you’re seeing a whole lot of “command not found” style errors on screen, you might need to open the script in a text editor and enter each line individually. I had to do this on one of my machines to get things working.

Preparing MAMP

If you use OS X’s built in PHP server, you probably don’t need to go through this next part. If, however, you’re using MAMP, then you’ll need to configure it to be able to install your extensions.

Providing the PHP source

Assuming you’ve already installed MAMP (it has an installer package, so it’s pretty easy), you’ll need to download the MAMP Server components and libraries from the MAMP Downloads page (under the heading “Source code”).

Once this is downloaded, unzip it and find the file for PHP with the version number corresponding to the one you use. If you’re not sure which one you’re using, open the MAMP application, and look at the PHP section in the Preferences pane. Unzip this as well.

Now we need to find the PHP folder in your MAMP install. It’ll reference the PHP version number selected in the Preferences, and it’s pretty likely that you’ll find it in /Applications/MAMP/bin/php. Open it in Finder and then create a new folder inside called include. Copy the folder we unzipped into here and rename it php. The result should be something like this:

Now go to Terminal and use the following command to navigate to the folder we copied. You might have to adjust it if your MAMP installation or version of PHP is different.

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

Then configure it using this command:

./configure

It’ll build and run checks and eventually you’ll get a License and a thank you notice and you’ll get a new command prompt.

Using the correct PHP installation

Now that we have everything in place, we need to use the MAMP installation of PHP rather than the default OS X installation. We can change this pretty easily (again, adjust the path if necessary to that it points to your version of PHP):

echo "export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.profile

Now we just need to get Terminal to read in the new path variable.

. ~/.profile

And now we tell pear and pecl where our php.ini file is. You can find this by going to your MAMP installation’s phpInfo page – http://localhost/MAMP/ – and looking at the “Loaded Configuration File”. Then just run these two commands (adjusting depending on where your php.ini is located):

pear config-set php_ini /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/php.ini
pecl config-set php_ini /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/php.ini

Install an extension

There are two ways to install an extension: the shortcut and the full version. They both do basically the same thing, but if you have issues with one, try the other.

The Shortcut

Open up Terminal and start by doing a channel update for either PEAR or PECL (in this case, PECL):

pecl channel-update pecl.php.net

Now run the install for your extension.

pecl install uploadprogress

And then add the extension to the php.ini file.

extension=uploadprogress.so

Assuming you get no errors, that’s it. Restart the MAMP servers and away you go!

The Long Way Around

Open up Terminal and browse to whatever directory you want temp files to be located in. In this case, temp in the user’s home folder.

cd ~/temp

Next we’ll download and extract the extension’s source with the following two commands:

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/uploadprogress-1.0.3.1.tgz
tar zxvf uploadprogress-1.0.3.1.tgz

Navigate into the new directory and prepare for compiling.

cd uploadprogress-1.0.3.1
phpize && ./configure -with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config

Finally, compile and install the extension.

make && make install

And finally, add the extension to the php.ini file.

extension=uploadprogress.so

Restart the MAMP servers and away you go!

Dealing with errors…

If you try installing an extension at this point, you might get an error complaining that the config file is corrupted. If you get that error then simply delete the pear.conf file (it should be located in the same folder as php.ini).

If you get an error saying that autoconf couldn’t be found, then the additional command line tools probably didn’t get installed correctly. Open up the script you downloaded and enter each line individually into Terminal rather than running the script. IF everything seems ok, try installing again.

Jelly and Bean

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:52:00 +1100

Today, Branden Maynes (@brandroidattack) and I launched the very first episode of our new fortnightly podcast, Jelly and Bean. This is something completely new and different for the both of us, but we’re hoping that as we find our groove (we’re still a little nervous/excited), we’ll also find ourselves amongst your other podcast subscriptions.

~~We’ve not arrived in the iTunes listing just yet, if can take a little while for that sort of thing to take, but~~ You can subscribe on the iTunes store, subscribe to our RSS feed directly, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

Is there anything you’d like us to talk about in our next episode?

KEY-REX I’M PRETTY SURE IF YOU JUMP OFF THE TOWER YOU...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 19:46:13 +1000

KEY-REX I’M PRETTY SURE IF YOU JUMP OFF THE TOWER YOU WON’T MAGICALLY RIDE AN EAGLE TO SAFETY, THAT’S JUST A GUESS THOUGH

LEONARDO DA VINCI WASN’T A NINJA TURTLE, KEY-REX....

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:58:33 +1000

LEONARDO DA VINCI WASN’T A NINJA TURTLE, KEY-REX. SERIOUSLY, WHERE DO YOU LEARN YOUR HISTORY?

NO KEY-REX THE VENUS DE MILO ISN’T MADE OUT OF GUMMI LIKE...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:35:00 +1000

NO KEY-REX THE VENUS DE MILO ISN’T MADE OUT OF GUMMI LIKE ON THE SIMPSONS

NO KEY-REX WE CAN NOT STEAL A GONDOLA TO RIDE AROUND IN

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:53:50 +1000

NO KEY-REX WE CAN NOT STEAL A GONDOLA TO RIDE AROUND IN

DANG IT KEY-REX THAT’S MY ORANGE JUICE

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 02:10:23 +1000

DANG IT KEY-REX THAT’S MY ORANGE JUICE

WHAT ARE YOU DOING KEY-REX YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LOOK AT ART...

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:00:58 +1000

WHAT ARE YOU DOING KEY-REX YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LOOK AT ART AT THE LOUVRE (Taken with Instagram at Apple Store)

You guys, Key-Rex went to Rome (me and my wife were also there I...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 03:35:07 +1000

Key-Rex visits the Pantheon.

KEY-REX IS VISITING THE COLOSSEUM, YOU GUYS

KEY-REX, EVEN IF YOU COULD POP OUT OF THE TRAPDOORS, THERE ARE NO GLADIATORS TO EAT.

You guys, Key-Rex went to Rome (me and my wife were also there I guess), and these are some of the photos of his big adventure!

You can see more pics of Key-Rex in Rome on Flickr!

Also, you can buy your own Key-Rex at TopatoCo, and you should, because Dinosaur Comics is basically the most awesome, you guys. Also he makes a great travel companion!

KEY-REX IF YOU DON’T BEHAVE YOU’LL BE WALKING TO THE...

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:42:39 +1000

KEY-REX IF YOU DON’T BEHAVE YOU’LL BE WALKING TO THE TOP

KEY-REX, STOP TELLING EVERYONE THAT YOU CARRIED ME UP TO THE TOP...

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 04:57:29 +1000

KEY-REX, STOP TELLING EVERYONE THAT YOU CARRIED ME UP TO THE TOP OF THE CUPOLA AT THE BASILICA OF SAINT PETER

KEY-REX THE (TERRIFYING) GLADIATOR VISITS THE COLOSSEUM

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 03:11:40 +1000

KEY-REX THE (TERRIFYING) GLADIATOR VISITS THE COLOSSEUM

KEY-REX YOU CAN’T SWIM IN THE FONTANA DI TREVI

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 01:08:00 +1000

KEY-REX YOU CAN’T SWIM IN THE FONTANA DI TREVI