Ronald! » apple

OS X, Apache and symbolic links

ronald — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:55:58 +0000

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.

Creating a web symlink in 10.6

Configure Apache

The installation of Apache that ships with OS X I use doesn’t allow symlinks by default, so I’ve added Options +FollowSymLinks in the Apache configuration. These are located in /private/etc/apache2 and while you could enable this in httpd.conf I like to keep the system-wide configuration as clean as possible and edited the (ronald is my username) instead. I’ve also added AllowOverride All there to be able to use .htaccess files, but thats another topic.

Restart Apache by disabling and enabling “Web Sharing” in the sharing preference pane

Create a symlink

That’s just a matter of executing "ln -s ../Documents/website ." in the ~/Sites directory. Alas browsing to http://localhost/~ronald/website gives a 403 (forbidden) page. Inspecting the serverlog tells me that either apache is not allowed to follow symlinks (which it is) or the _www user hasn’t got enough rights to access ~/Documents/website.

It’s all about permissions

Well, that’s just stupid because the directory is readable/executable for everyone. Changing my ~/Documents folder to be world readable/executable did the trick. Apparently every directory in the path needs to be accessible. Damn me and my inferior UNIX permissions knowledge!

So it’s either making my entire Documents directory world readable, which I don’t really like, or adding the _www user and myself to some group and change ownership of my Documents directory to that group to make my entire Documents folder readable for myself and the _www user, which is slightly less bad. So chmodding everything except the directories linked for web access inside the Documents folder 700 seems the right way to go.

In 10.5 the holy grail was to mess around with the Access Control List but that wasn’t needed in 10.6, so I suggest leaving that part alone.

NetNewsWire

ronald — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:07:12 +0000

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.

How Apple runs nasty tricks

ronald — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:38:33 +0000

Sometimes when people find out I own a Macbook and since a week also an iPhone they call me an apple-freak. There are of course many apple fans always bashing the PC/Windows users and vica versa, but I don’t think I belong to those groups. I like the apple products, and thats my prerogative. And I cenrtainly don’t think all Apple does is great. It’s really funny to watch keynotes and see the crowd going wild when Steve Jobs introduces a new color for the iPod, to observe the way they price the only make the cool colored iPods the most expensive ones and the fastest macbook only in black.

Recently I have been searching the web for ways to sync my iPhone and Laptop wireless and found only rumors that it would be possible and only custom-build workarounds that don’t get the trick just right yet (though it is a good piece of work). Today I think I found out why this is the case when I stumbled upon MobileMe, a online service by Apple which enables users to sync all of their devices wireless. Oh, and I am unable to find on their site howmuch this service costs, only that I can try it out for free for six months…

Vista on my MacBook, part two

ronald — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:13:40 +0000

The bad part about a deceased hard disc is that I’ve had to live a full week without my MacBook. The good part is that using the Leopard DVD I could simply restore my entire system from backup putting it in the state of the last backup which happend to be a few hours before the hard disc died. Great, only too bad that I had to reïnstall Vista again.

Not that I use Vista much, so just a clean install and adding some programs should do just fine. I also thought to be smart and leave some unpartitioned space for the installation, saving me a partition resize using the Bootcamp Assistant. Just too bad that the disc is partitioned using a GUID Partition Table (GTD) which is not supported. Vista (or any other flavour of Windows for that matter) requires a Master Boot Record (MBR).

Many web pages tell me to use Disk Utility to change the disc from GTD to MBR, but unless they are refering to a different Disk Utility mine does not have that option. I almost made a bootable CD with rEFIt (which is used in the tutorial to install OSX/Windows/Linux on a macbook) but decided to stop experimenting around and simply use the Boot Camp Assistant to erase the Bootcamp partition and then to create a Bootcamp partition. Lame solution. Takes about 2 minutes.

Thinking ahead… brilliant!