Steam (Mac Screen shot) As a Mac user Steam used to be something from another planet, until recently. I am happy Steam comes to the Mac, bringing lots of great games for me to play. The news that Portal is free (for a limited time) was the trigger for me to actually get started with Steam. And my joy went away fast.

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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.

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Snow LeopardOnce 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.

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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.