OS X » Ronald!

As everyone it took me some time, though not more than a day or two, to get used to natural scrolling in OS X Lion, but now I really like it. If feels natural because it feels like you put your fingers on the page and pull it upwards to scroll down, and vice versa. The same thing goes for the four finger swipe to switch between spaces and full screen applications. Hold the current space, and pull it to the left to reveal the space or application on the right.

It does not, however, work that way with the three finger gesture to go to the next or previous page, which also works as the back/next button in my browser. Visualizing the pages of a document or in your browser history as numbered pages going from left to right seems the most natural (if you read from left to right as I do). But swiping to the left brings you to the previous page, not the next. I ask you to go into mission control. Do a four-finger swipe to the left, and then a three finger swipe to the left and see what happens (you will go to the next space, and then go back to the previous space). Same direction, different result.

The trackpad gestures take little time to get used to, the direction doesn’t really matter that much because you get used to it. But because these swipe gestures are inconsistent they still causes me to make the wrong gesture. I hope those human-interface geniuses at Apple will realize this too and, most importantly, fix it.

I don’t pay much attention to my hard disk usage nor do I remember to periodically empty the trash. In fact, I don’t want to empty the trash as long as the disk space is available because you never know when to need to restore a trashed file.

To keep track of my disk usage I made a simple bash script that determines the free space and size of the trash and sends a Growl notification if the disk space is running low or the trash is to big (absolute or proportional to the free space available) and set my crontab to run it every 15 minutes. Continue reading »

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.

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.

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.

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.

Inconsistent gestures in OSX Lion

Disk usage notification

My First Steam experience

PDO: Configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP on OSX 10.5.7

OS X, Apache and symbolic links

Snow Leopard

The day the Apples fell from the tree

DJ Ronald!

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