Go Global Gadget ^™

GCP now has a 24 hour graph to go along with the dot.

We just added the ability for tweet rooster to remember individual users. It’s now a check box in the tweet rooster window.

We’ve published a new tool for all you website owners and blog operators.  Tweet Roosters is a little button that enables your users and readers to post to their Twitter account directly from your website or blog.  Why would someone put this tool on their website?  It takes only a little bit of space and opens up in a box directly on your website but primarily it helps your website or blog get more exposure on Twitter.

There is even a WordPress Widget Plugin for Tweet Rooster.

There is a new place for checking out the new DVD releases:

The DVDs coming out this week and next are displayed with the most popular discs

The basic premise is that if you do a straight “./configure”, “make”, “make install” for your Xserve then the binaries will end up being 32 bit. Apple’s installation is 64 bit but if you want anything custom about Apache or PHP, you’ll need to compile it yourself and you’ll need to know what your doing to make the architecture match. What do you do to make that happen? This post is for Intel Xeon Xserves only. You can modify a few things to get the 64 bit PowerPC version of your software running.

This is not for the faint of heart. If you know at least a little about building and installing packages then you’ll be much better off.

First, you need to execute this command before running any “./configure”

export CFLAGS=”-arch x86_64 -arch i386″

The reason is that when you run configure it embeds these environment variables into your Makefile. This will create both a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of any software you build.

The next thing you need to know is that some packages, especially those that you build into PHP won’t compile multiple architectures “out of the box”. For example, Freetype, GD, and mhash will complain about multiple architectures. So you need to add this to your ./configure options:

./configure –disable-dependency-tracking …(all other options)

The “–disable-dependency-tracking” option will enable you to create multiple architectures. Dependency tracking is apparently not needed to make everything work.

The next step is PHP. This is our php configure list. It’s long but dutiful.

./configure –prefix=/usr –mandir=/usr/share/man –infodir=/usr/share/info –disable-dependency-tracking –with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs –with-ldap=/usr –with-kerberos=/usr –enable-cli –with-zlib-dir=/usr –enable-trans-sid –with-xml –enable-exif –enable-ftp –enable-mbstring –enable-mbregex –enable-dbx –with-iodbc=/usr –with-curl=/usr –with-config-file-path=/etc –sysconfdir=/private/etc –with-mysql-sock=/var/mysql –with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config –with-mysql=/usr –with-pdo-mysql=/usr –with-openssl –with-xsl=/usr –with-gd –with-jpeg-dir=/usr –with-mhash –enable-memory-limit –with-freetype-dir=/usr –with-ttf=/usr

Some of these options require external libraries. I will let you figure that out The same rules apply to building those projects for 64 bit and 32 bit. PDO is needed because we use PRADO extensively.

One problem we’ve run into is certain libraries not being 64 bit. Specifically libmysqlclient.dylib and libmygcc.a. This was a tough one to figure out. But eventually we got it working by downloading the 386 and the x86_64 bit version of mysql.tar.gz. These packages come with their respective versions of libmysqlclient.dylib and libmygcc.a. In fact, there are 6 dylibs that we wanted to make into multiple architectures:

• libmysqlclient.15.0.0.dylib
• libmysqlclient.15.dylib
• libmysqlclient.dylib
• libmysqlclient_r.15.0.0.dylib
• libmysqlclient_r.15.dylib
• libmysqlclient_r.dylib

You need to use the “lipo” command to put these binaries together for multiple architectures. Before replacing any libraries in your system you should back them up!

Once you’ve backed up your existing libraries you can do your “lipo”:

lipo -create mysql-5.0.67-osx10.5-x86/lib/libmysqlclient.dylib mysql-5.0.67-osx10.5-x86_64/lib/libmysqlclient.dylib -output libmysqlclient/libmysqlclient.dylib

This will stick the two versions of the dylib together into one dylib. As you can see we have a directory called libmysqlclient and that’s where we are storing the new binaries. Then they can be copied to where they need to go. (Usually they go in /usr/lib/ and would replace what goes in there.)

If you’re only recompiling PHP into your Xserve and not apache then you should be able to do that with all the above. We highly recommend you stick with the Apple Apache build.

If you’re more adventurous and would like to recompile Apache too then you can use these configuration flags.

./configure –prefix=/usr –enable-mods-shared=all –enable-deflate –enable-so –with-ssl –enable-proxy –enable-proxy-balancer –enable-proxy-http –enable-dav –sysconfdir=/etc/apache2 –enable-dav-fs –with-z –libexecdir=/usr/libexec/apache2 –enable-cgi –bindir=/usr/sbin –with-apr=/usr –with-apr-util=/usr
make
make install

The standard Apple Apache installation puts the files in /usr/sbin so this is going to replace the Apple installation.

We’ve put together a small project that shows the light map and the night lights of the earth. It can be found at Earth Light Map.

Here is a small sample:

eBay has written about Twibler on their developer community blog:

Special thanks to Laurel Kline.

It’s been done and there are many sites that do this but we wanted to add our two cents to the market. We wanted to make it simple and easy. Check out

What’s great about this tool is that it will crawl your entire website for one low price…. FREE. Reports are generated via email so all you need to do is enter the website to crawl and your email address. It’s even optimized not to pull down data files like Word Documents and PDFs so as to save bandwidth though the links are still checked.

The dot is an index of the Global Consciousness Project. It is the real time analysis of their data. This site downloads their data once a minute and runs sophisticated probability functions to find the coherency the random numbers are that are generated by the project. The theory is that global human thought changes the way the random numbers are generated and thus captures the unity of thought across the world. The new website can be found here at the GCP Dot. Here is the web enabled version of the dot:

This is the iGoogle gadget version and the Apple Dashboard Version:

We recently developed an Apple Dashboard widget for Worldlabel.Com. This was a fun one to make and is now available as an iGoogle gadget and a Dashboard widget. You can see them both below. The iGoogle gadget is a live version.

Install in iGoogle.

Download the Dashboard Widget.

To find out more info you can go to the gadget info page

The amazing thing about the Dashboard gadget is that it became the Featured Dashboard Widget in the Dashboard Downloads section of Apple.com. It was featured the day after it was listed. Here is a screenshot of the event:

This new image gadget is truly artful. We created it for Destination 360 to show of their beautiful image gallery. They’ve had a lot of success with their theme: Las Vegas. Their gadget is really interesting because it adapts to the size of the gadget. In nearly all other gadgets the image either doesn’t fit in the gadget or there is wasted space around the image. This technology dynamically resizes the image to fit in the gadget so there is no wasted space and no overhang. Here it is in action:

We created a new flash version of Ladybugs. These stay in a gadget. It’s possible to add this to MySpace or Facebook. (Version 1 Ladybugs are on the whole page and can’t be embedded on other websites.) Here is the gadget:

While there are other Astronomy Picture of the Day gadgets, we thought we could bring something unique to the table: The image that resizes to your gadget. There is no guessing or images that slide out of view with a smaller window.

One of the great product advertisements we put together was for Sharper Image. They wanted to show off some of their products over the 2007 Christmas season and we were there to help them with their advertisements.

Last year we here at Go Global Gadget LLC were privileged to create an advertisement for Netflix.

This Adobe Flash Google Gadget Ad was run on many high profile websites from Oct 11th 2007 to Oct 18th 2007 to promote the Netflix Promotion Campaign called Netflix Now Playing Featuring Dana Carvey. We converted the video from High Definition TV mp4 into the exact size seen in the gadget ad. This was to reduce the size (width, height, quality, and file size) of the video for accessibility and thus allow more users to view the ad. We also maintained the 16:9 aspect ratio while having space for all the other elements of ad. There is even a button in the ad for adding the gadget to the users’ homepages. This adds a viral nature to the ad itself.

To help reduce their company overhead we hosted the gadget, the gadget ad, and the video. 4,000,000 ad views were expected over the week.

The Google Gadget Ad platform was utilized to measure the interactions of users and the gadget to test its effectiveness. Also, the Google Proxy Caching was used to reduce bandwidth consumption on the hosting server.