Blogs

7/18/09 - Having trouble starting MySQL on system startup? Rob Wilkerson shows how he gets around the issue.

4/2/08 - UPDATED - Replaced symlink to MySQL socket with proper MySQL configuration file settings. Thanks Doug!

10/20/07 - UPDATED - Added full path to aliases, thanks Joel!

10/7/07 - UPDATED - Clarified +server option and executable names, thanks Thom!

I decided to move my MySQL server installation from the server I installed from MySQL.com to macports. Why? I believe MacPorts will simplify future upgrades. I'd also like to keep my LAMP installs in the same location. If you haven't already, install and configure MacPorts. Here are the steps I'll go over:

• Intall MySQL 5
• Create the initial MySQL databases
• Options for starting MySQL
• Confirm that MySQL is running
• Set Basic MySQL Security

The PHP Developer Tools Project reached a major milestone this week with the version 1.0 release of PDT. I had recently installed the all-in-one Europa/PDT release and received errors when attempting to update via the Update Manager—something about being unable to unzip a package. Today, however, everything seems fine and when I reviewed Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration -> PDT Feature, it showed version 1.0 as installed.

With most folks focused on Facebook apps or the latest YouTube craze, a lot of incredible projects go unnoticed for way too long. Several months ago someone on irc.freenode mentioned reCAPTCHA to me, an amazingly novel idea that keeps spammers out while digitizing literary works.

I compiled the latest version of PHP this week at work. It took longer than I expected and dealing with the myriad of package dependencies required to add support for XML/XSLT, GD, and Sybase/MS SQL Server was a PITA. While I know that *nix server administrators must be able to compile software from source, I wouldn't want to make it a regular practice.

Just like Linux distributions, Unix package managers exist for Mac OS X. There are two package managers available for the Mac: MacPorts and Fink. Although Fink appears to have a much larger user base, MacPorts is more closely tied to Apple's open source community. In this post I'll go over how you can use MacPorts to manage Unix libraries, modules for languages including Perl and Python, and open source applications, including Wordpress, MediaWiki, and Gallery.

Okay, okay, I know, what you're going to say. Every techie blogger has already spouted off their list of "can't live without" Firefox extensions. To be honest, it's been a while since I last posted and needed something easy to get me back into the swing again.

So here's my list of Firefox extensions that I've just gotta have for web development and life on the Net.