The Wax Drum

A Web Development Toolkit

Although I don't have it yet, apparently Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" comes with ROR. I'm still on "Tiger", so I had to install it manually. Fortunately, I found a great Tutorial at Dave Benjamin's Site.

I encountered a funky problem on this very site where certain characters in my news feeds were getting garbled in the database. I suspected it was a Unicode/UTF-8/etc problem, and upon exploration I discovered this suggestion. First backup the table(s) with the offending data:

$ mysqldump -uusername -ppassword --add-drop-table --default-character-set=latin1 database table > backup.sql

Then restore the table(s) with the following command:

mysql -uusername -ppassword --default-character-set=utf8 database < backup.sql

I learned about Analog through a friend whose web site is hosted at Cornerhost. I loved the taglines after "You'll fine three things here:"

Cornerhost uses a GNU/GPL utility called "Analog", a well-designed and very customizeable utility which reads Apache's standard log file format, processes and formats the data into HTML code. Point your browser to the resulting output for an easy and clear method of analyzing your web server's access logs.

This was a "nice" add-on with PhotoShop 7 which became a true "feature" in PhotoShop CS with the ability to enlarge previews to a reasonable size without a loss in image quality (even without using "generate high-quality previews - see below).

So I'm flush in a world of cheap storage and my 80GB laptop drive makes me feel "crowded". But ok, I have my external drive (a HUGE plus for the recent global reinstall), DVD backups, and so on.

Show me by editing this page. Include a description and a link to your image. The image should be about 600x400 pixels. I'll start...
Name: Charles
Occupation: Photographer

The one thing in my laptop bag (besides my laptop) I can't live without: My Sonos Digital Music System

In 2006, Apple issued a recall related to Powerboook batteries. Apparently, some of the Sony manufactured batteries had a proclivity for bursting into flames. Over 10 million Sony batteries were recalled during 2006 including 1.8 million Powerbook batteries.

Visit Apple's battery exchange page for details.

The Geeky Side of Mac OS X

Here is my personal collection of Mac OS X technical odds & ends. For more specific tech tips under Mac OS X, refer to the following pages.

• Apache
• Audio
• Perl
• NetJuke

Make Hidden Apps Look Hidden

The Geeky Side of Mac OS X

Here is my personal collection of Mac OS X technical odds & ends. For more specific tech tips under Mac OS X, refer to the following pages.

• Apache
• Audio
• Perl
• NetJuke

Make Hidden Apps Look Hidden

Leopard Update

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", Apple has made a few more changes. Whereas prior versions came with Apache 1.3, PHP 4, and MySQL 4, Leopard comes (sort of) pre-configured with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5. The MySQL part is still a little tricky.

Here are some notes regarding MySQL under 10.5:

1. There is still the discrepancy between the old and new locations for mysql.sock
2. NetInfo is no longer available for setting up users & groups, however...
3. Leopard comes configured with a _mysql user and _mysql group