OS X

A cool example

May 6, 2004

The folks over at concord.org have a cool example of using Apple's WebKit API and Cocoa Component technology to create a simple Java web browser. It does a good job of demonstrating how simple it could be to implement a browser interface that understands many standards out of the box.

PHPLens

April 6, 2004

I've been doing some work with PHPLens today. It installs nicely on OS X. I'm running Aaron Faby's Complete PHP. Complete PHP does not include the Zend Optimizer which is required for PHPlens. It is easy to get the optimizer from the ZEND website and install it into the Complete PHP setup. The only thing it takes is changing a few of the configuration lines (which the installer asks you about when you run it).

Decommissioned software

March 1, 2004

Brian Clark wrote MacinTouch today about his decision last week to stop publishing and selling several shareware products. It raises an interesting question as many states have laws about warranties and how long certain items have to be supported. Most (if not all) software avoids this by having licenses that specify that you are purchasing a right to use instead of a product that may fall under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

Drupal Bookmarklet for Safari

February 9, 2004

I finally got around to putting together a Drupal bookmarklet for Safari. Replace www.example.com with your server and make sure the rest of the path is correct and it should work for you.

javascript:t=window.getSelection();void(window.open ('http://www.example.com/node/add/blog?edit[title]= '+escape(document.title)+'&edit[body]='+escape(t)+'', '_blank','width=710,height=500,status=yes,resizable=yes, scrollbars=yes'));

Drag this to your menu bar and edit the website and it should work.

MySQL Count() Problem on OS X

February 8, 2004

I've been running Drupal on OS X server and it works well. However I've had a problem that has been reported on the Drupal site as well.
SELECT mode, COUNT(*) FROM users GROUP BY mode; causes problems. The count returned is way out of bounds.
It returns a count of 864691128455135232. While a
SELECT COUNT(uid) FROM users ;
returns 12 - the correct number. The problem is that there are some places (in the import module for example) where there is a COUNT() instead of a COUNT(DISTINCT). For example in the import module the following change will resolve the issue. Change:

iFile

February 6, 2004

Last month Tidbits published an interview with Bruce Horn on the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. In the article Bruce talks about what he is doing today and discusses iFile. The article is important because it talks about transforming the way in which file systems store information. Not in the sense of how bytes are organized, although that is important as well, but in the sense of how users interact with the filesystem.

Things you shouldn't do

January 23, 2004

I had a call today from someone who had changed their home directory's name in OS X. This is a bad idea. The way permissions are set in OS X you can do this if you are an administrator. Users who have not been given administrator privileges lack the rights to make such a change. It reminds me that I saw a problem a short time ago where users can enter short user names that are longer than 8 characters. This causes problems for the unix underpinnings of the OS. These are things that should be fixed to prevent people having problems with their systems.

From what I've seen users should change the permissions on the /Users/ directory to prevent accidents. The command:

% sudo chmod g-w /Users/

will change it so that users with Admin privileges don't accidently change the name of their home directory. The % is not a part of the command but the end of the prompt where you type the command

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