Category: Mac

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Came home from a nice diner last night, turned on my Power Book G4, and it greeted me with a black screen and three ominous tones. Ugggggggh! Of course, the plan was to do loads of work today, instead I am headed to Tekserve to see if I can get my poor Powerbook repaired.

Update:

Two updates actually: First, Tekserve repair is closed on Sunday, and yes, I could have gleaned that from their web site. Second, Tekserve repair on Monday afternoon feels a lot like the DMV; a two hour wait with a lot of frustrated people milling around.

Conclusion: Logic board problem, 1 week to ten days to fix. Bummer.

Update II:

It is 30DEC and the Mac is back and I couldn’t be happier! I found a few complaints about Tekserve, but I have to say, based on this experience, they do a good job. They fixed my computer within the period of time they originally estimated, and everyone I dealt with in the store was pleasant. My only complaint is about the wait, which was nowhere near as bad tonight as when I dropped off. Waiting is probably to be expected when they are one of the only games in town the biggest city in the country. Note to self: Go to Tekserve early in the morning as opposed to in the afternoon or evening.

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Switcher AdThese switcher ads don’t extol the virtues of the Mac OS nor do they outline the frustrations of the average PC user. Instead, they feature life long republicans and other (former) Bush supporters speaking about how the current administration has let them down. The advertisements were created by Errol Morris for MoveOn. There are over 40 spots available for your viewing pleasure on Morris’ site.

via Cult of Mac & BoingBoing

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I’ve been an instant messaging fan for years, but I quickly grew tired of having three different clients open in order to connect to everyone. At work I, and others, have been using Trillian and Trillian Pro for some time to enjoy an ad Free, multi-protocol, IM experience. Trillian is great, but it isn’t available for Mac.AdiumX Screenshot

So, I’ve been using Fire for the better part of a year on the OSX side. Fire is great. Although, it is missing a couple features I had come to rely on in Trillian Pro. The first one that comes to mind is the way that Trillian inserts the last several lines of IMs to and from a buddy into new chat windows. Fire logs messages, but you have to look at them in a separate file.

A week or so ago, I ran across AdiumX, which is another multi-protocol IM client. AdiumX gives me everything Fire did, plus it sports a few other nice features. The user interface is a little sleeker and more customizable than Fire. The tabbed chat windows are a great addition and really cut down on desktop clutter. The integration with Address Book is also nice, it can display a person’s real name as opposed to their buddy name so you don’t have to remember that Mad$kilz872 = Jim.

Overall, AdiumX gets my vote. Of course, if you are a Windows users, you won’t be able to use AdiumX. In that case, I would go with Trillian over anything else I’ve seen or used. All three of the clients mentioned here are freely available for download. AdiumX is free, but accepts donations on their web site. Fire is also free and I can’t seem to find a place to send donations to the developers. Trillian offers a free basic version, and a slightly more advanced Pro version which is worth the $25 price tag in my opinion.

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I’ve been putting off the installation of Apache, PHP and MySQL on my Powerbook for some time now. I’m not really sure why since I didn’t think it would be all that difficult, and after finding out how easy it really was today, I wish I had done it months ago.

First of all, Apache and PHP are already installed, this makes things pretty simple. In order to get PHP running, a few minor changes need to be made in the httpd config. I found these instructions to be quite helpful for the Apache and PHP configuration, I skipped his MySQL and Dreamweaver instructions though.

A MySQL installer for Mac OS 10.2 and 10.3 is available from MySQL’s site. Included in the download is an install package for the auto-startup utility as well.

If you do any MySQL work at all, even if you don’t have it installed on your local machine, I highly recommend CocoaMySQL. It is a clean and simple GUI front end for working with MySQL databases.

Update [more MySQL]:

After installing MySQL, there are a few statements you might want to run to secure things before moving on. Methods to secure MySQL are well documented, this is what I chose to do since my installation is only for development purposes:

After installation, the root password is not set, so I gave the root logon a password:

UPDATE user SET Password = PASSWORD("password")
WHERE User = "root";

There is also a user without a username, this is used when no user is specified when connecting to the database. I don’t need this, so I deleted the user:

DELETE FROM User
WHERE User = "";

Since I don’t log into my computer as root, I thought it would helpful to have a superuser with the same name as the OSX username I normally use. This username will be used for all DB maintenance tasks:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO user@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "password"
WITH GRANT OPTION;

Normally, in a production environment, web applications will connect to the database with limited permissions. To simulate this in the development environment, a webuser login is created for web applications. In this case, webuser’s permissions are not all that limited, but they can be modified easily to simulate more restrictive permissions (like read only) without affecting my login. This is useful in testing to make sure the application won’t break when it gets more restricted access than it was used to in the development environment. The following statement assumes that a new database named “webdev” has been created:

GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON webdev.*
TO webuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY "password";