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.
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.
I’m no fanboy per se, I just happen to like my MacBook and iPhone a lot. But not today, as today the battery of my MB broke down and my phone just crashed while making a photo. Also while rebooting I held both keys down to power down the thing which it didn’t respond to until after booting up and showing my background and asking for my passcode just for a second. Of course the timing could also just be a coincidence.
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!