dougrdotnet

It appears that upon installation/upgrade of Mac to Snow Leapard (OSX 10.6) that the symbolic link (alias) to MySql is removed.
I wanted to make a note here for future reference on creating an alias using terminal on Mac.  Hope this helps you as well.

Following Snow Leapard upgrade with existimg MySql instance, MySql Server will not start.  The server folder cannot be found.  In order to fix, a symbolic link needs to be created in the folder where MySql Server is installed.  The link created will provide an alias which Snow Leopard will use to find the instance.
Creating an alias:
Using terminal as sudo cd into the local folder.

$ cd /user/local/

View contents of local to get the full name of MySql instance (something like mysql-5.0.67-osx10.5-x86)

$ ls

Create the alias “mysql”:

$ ln -s /user/local/[your MySql instance name]/ mysql

Open system preferences from apple menu and start MySql Server.

HTH!

Last time, I completed detailing the steps needed to clone a disk image to an external drive using SuperDuper.  The process was quite seamless and very simple, SuperDuper did a great job and stands up to its name.  We ended up doing some general comparisons between the old and new drive and are now ready to remove the new drive from the external enclosure, remove the old drive from a MacBook, and install the new drive in its place.  We’ll then boot up with the new drive to see how it went.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

I left off in Hard Drive Upgrade with an external drive prepared and ready to receive an image of my existing primary drive.  That article discussed backup strategies, a list of items needed in order to perform the data migration and what is needed in order to get started. We then stepped through the process of formatting and partitioning an external drive.

In this article, we are going to go through the process of using SuperDuper.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

Just the other day, I was working away on my MacBook when all of the sudden a popup launched that said something to the effect that host drive was out of space, cannot complete operation.  I was caught totally by surprise, launched Finder, and behold I had just a bit over 200 Mb left on my drive.  Time for a drive upgrade.

Over the next few days, I’m going to show you step by step how to upgrade your Mac hard drive.  This guide is completely comprehensive.  I will cover every step from backup to installation.  Let’s get started.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

MAMP, which is an acronym for Mac Apache MySQL PHP, is an application which sets up a local Web server development environment in a matter of minutes.  It includes support for all of the servers listed as part of its name (support for SQLite is also included).

MAMP provides three basic necessities for any Web application; being a Web server, a database server, and a Web application server – Apache, MySQL, and PHP respectively.  Although Apple ships Mac computers with these three servers pre-installed, setup and configuration is not abstracted into a configuration interface as provided by MAMP.

MAMP installation is simple, lets go through the process together.

See the rest of my article on Lost In Technology.

Through virtue of a MacBook becoming available at work, I have recently begun a conversion to the Mac platform. This has been pretty humorous because I am completely a Mac novice – to the point of being open game for pranks at work (ie lets change Doug’s desktop to Sepia). This occurred closely following my new install and I thought I messed up something, so I created a new user and deleted what I thought was a corrupt user config. Nice one Jr!

I will continue to develop on Windows as well since we need to test on as many platforms as we can and I have the Windows dev setup.
Yesterday I learned just how excellent the track pad is on the Mac and have been working on committing to memory as many keyboard shortcuts as I can.

I will be following up on this post related setting up my dev environment and such. Right now my big challenge is figuring out how to get Apache set up on the Mac (not the 1.3 which ships). I keep running into and error related to no C compiler in $path – more about that later.

Since the last time I blogged I have been busy developing a Flex/AIR/CF application at work and have also begun to learn Ruby (this has been fun!). I have a feeling that with my company there will be Ruby on Rails work on the horizon
Mac

A discussion of JavaScript – basic understanding took place recently and I wanted to share my take on trying to answer some of the main questions which were posed.

JavaScript, like any programming language, is not easy to learn and depending upon one’s knowlege of a language the person’s perception of “easy to use” will be determined. For the purposes of this discussion we could center on the ease of use of predefined one-line functions such as getFullYear() which surprisingly returns the full four numeral year. It is important to note that this and other functions like this get their data from the client, so if it is 2006 and your computer’s calendar is set to 2007 then getFullYear() will return the incorrect year.
Conversely, JavaScript is a fully functional programming language. A common misconception is that JavaScript, due to the virtue of being a scripting language, is easy. Easy may equate to difficult when taken in relative context to very difficult.

Usability and maintainability rule design and JavaScript can provide both. During planning and design whenever any element of a site can be identified as an item which requires maintenance, using a tool such as JavaScript to automate that process should be a consideration. A very simple and common example is the need to update the copyright © date every January first. This may not seem like a big deal, but what if you have 10 sites each with 10 pages and each page’s copyright date has been hard coded. Well now you have 100 pages to maintain, I can think of better things to do with my time. Instead you can use the following function to return the current date from the client:





And even better yet, instead of placing this script in each page, place the script in an external .js file and call the function using the src attribute of the <script> tag. That way whenever you may make any changes to the function those changes will naturally propagate to each calling occurrence.
This is called code reuse and should be a paramount consideration to any programmer. Not only does this practice allow for greater maintainability but results in much more readable, organized, self-documenting, and maintainable code. Also by reusing code as in this example you will be able to go home on time instead of working late duplicating work.