A couple of months ago I purchased a router/wifi accesspoint which has been running smoothly, as expected, until a few weeks ago. After I installed an extra electrical outlet and some cable channels for the power and ethernet cables it suddenly stopped working. After a frustrating evening where I at first thought I damaged some of the cables I got it working again. Until yesterday.
Feb 052010
The bad part about my girlfriend moving in with me is that my friend who was living with me left and took our local sever with him. We had combined our spare hardware to build us a server and used his old computer because he had 4 ATA controllers and I had only 2. So now I had to configure my old PC to create a new server (’cause you just can’t live without one of those :) and bought an extra 1.5TB hard disk. That caused quite some trouble. Since the first wasn’t properly detected by my onboard SATA controller I returned it and the replacement seemed to work, only to be mounted as read-only after formatting it. After a while the disk wasn’t properly detected at all. I was surprised with two new disks having the exact same problem, fortunately so was the owner of the web shop where I bought it. He actually called me personally to discuss the situation and concluded that my SATA controller was probably to old to work properly with this big modern disk. So I bought an PCI eSATA controller which solved my problems.
Last weekend I took this card to my friend who also bought a new hard disk and was experiencing similar problems. After I put the card back my big disk wouldn’t mount anymore, though it worked fine when I booted the Ubuntu Live CD. Long story short (live cd: works, reinstall ubuntu: works, dist-upgrade: broken, reinstall: works, reboot: broken) there we suddenly some errors in the FS which fsck managed to fix.
Anyway, most of you aren’t at all interested in the above snipped of my life and want some technical information. Which you are going to get in the remaining part of this post. Hey, the benefit of people blogging technical stuff on their personal blog is that you have to read through the irrelevant stuff. Nothing is perfect, right?
Sep 292009
I’d like to use PDO in conjunction with MySQL, but in the PHP installation shipped with OS X by default only pdo_sqlite is enabled. I do not want to compile my own Apache or PHP so the way to go is to simply add the pdo_mysql module. I followed these instructions but after running phpize there were some warings on my screen and no makefile to be found. My current PHP version is 5.2.8 and I used the source of 5.3.0, so I tried again with 5.2.10 (since no other version was available at the PHP download page). Both yield the same result, namely that it compiles, installs and won’t start.
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo_mysql.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0
Following instructions in the comment to remove all architectures but the x86_64 have no effect. I think I have to compile my own PHP installation and have apache use that. Which sucks so much I decided to just wait for Snow Leopard and pray that either pdo_mysql is installed or dynamicly loading libraries is allowed there. I am happy to inform you all that the first is the case. Hurray!
I use my laptop a lot for web developement, and for some projects I have more files than just the web documents that Apache needs to see. For those I have a directory in my ~/Documents with (amongst other things) a httpdocs directory. I’d like to just see that in my browser by creating a symbolic link in my ~/Sites directory. This proved to be somewhat difficult in OS X 10.5 and also in my fresh installation of 10.6.
Sep 222009
Once again I’ve installed some new OS and write a small post about it. This time it’s all about Snow Leopard and as usual this is probably more interesting for myself as a checklist sort of thing than for the world to read. It gives more order and satisfaction in the long proces of installing and customisation and it functions as a central storage for all cool applications, tweaks and scripts that I install and create to make OS X function just the way I like it.
Sep 022009
I only just learned about Bing, watched a screencast and played around with it. I was hoping to be impressed by the nifty features demonstrated in the screencast, but everything I enter in Bing just gives me a plain old search result. I even read the help documents and entered the examples they gave, but none of those examples gave any special result.
So I am puzzled. Why would Microsoft launch a new product, show off its great features and then put a website live that doesn’t do any of the promised features? Looks to me like they have just doomed Bing.
Jun 062009
The past couple of days I’ve been playing around with GeekTool a nifty litlle application that can show text files, unix commands output (including scripts), or images (local and from the internet) on your desktop. There are many sites with examples out there which inspired me to create a GeekTool setup of my own.
I started playing around with several scripts and GeekTool because it looked cool at first and it was fun to do some shell scripting. As the amount of information displayed on my desktop grew I started wondering why I was creating a lot of small processes taking up a little CPU time. I hardly ever look at my desktop because of all the windows in front of it. But the stats now on my desktop are easily accesable with one key (F11), and some starts are already displayed in either the menu bar or my iStat Pro widget. Removing it there gives me more room in the menu bar (which is starting grow full of icons) and saves some resources used by the widget.
Now I shall explain the GeekTool entries I created more detailed.
Jun 032009
There are a lot of RSS readers out there, but since I have little requirements I just stick with reading my RSS feeds in Apple Mail. A few weeks ago the products of Newsgator got my attention.
The application for the Mac looks pretty standard. Multiple feeds organisable in folders, three panes, the usual. The two things I like a lot after using it for a few weeks are the a build-in browser so you don’t have to switch back and forth between your browser and news reader and the support for HTTP digest authentication which is used by Livejournal to gain access to the feeds of livejournals including the protected posts (if your LJ account has access to those).
The iPhone application is okay, haven’t used it that much.
But the good part is, besides the fact that these are both free applications, that they sync with each other via a free account at newsgator, so when I read a post on my mac the same post isn’t marked as unread anymore on my iPhone and vica versa. They also provide a web-based RS reader when you login to Newsgator which is a nice extra which I probably won’t use. It only seems usefull when I have some time to kill somewhere when I’m around a computer with internet access and without both my laptop and phone. But it’s a nice extra.
Jun 022009
Some error messages just do not display the way the developers intended them to.
And sometimes being right is wrong after all.
Jan 232009
The svn commandline tool is great, but when I don’t receive a e-mail notifying me of a new commit I hardly ever read the log messages. That’s why I added an alias to my profile called svnup which does an update and then prints the log from the revision before the update to now.
SVN_CURR_REV=`svn info|grep 'Last Changed Rev'|awk '{ print $4 }'`; \
svn up; \
svn log -r $SVN_CURR_REV:HEAD
Now I just have to remember tot type svnup instead of svn up.