I knew that my one year anniversary for joining Twitter was coming up soon so I set out to find out when I joined. According to whendidyoujointwitter.com it was a year ago today! My how time flies. My good friend Lyndsay had been trying to get me to join for months. And I do mean months; not days or weeks—full on months. I was hesitant as I was already addicted to too many time wasters. As mentioned in a previous post, she turned me on to quite a few great people I have slowly gotten to know through conversation. Now I’m not sure how it seems I could live without it.
I’ve discussed web development concepts, including a few of my “big ideas” with people. Helped troubleshoot Mac OS X issues (which were actually Microsoft issues). Commented on running and even on my own first full-marathon. I’ve found some great SEO tips and genuinely had fun. In fact, thanks to Twitter and some goof ball on it, I managed to go to my first ever PubCon in Las Vegas back in November 2009. Let’s just say when registration opens for the 2010, I’ll be sure to book my space early so I can take in some of the sessions.
All in all, it’s been a pretty sweet year when I look back on Twitter and how it has positively impacted my life. It’s had a few negative moments too, but we won’t go there. So tell me, when did you join Twitter? Leave it in the comments below.
Posted: January 9th, 2010 by Marshall
| Filed under Life, Twitter
It’s no secret that I recently upgraded my Mac Pro to run the latest version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It’s probably no secret to most people that I also develop code for various different websites and projects. That being said it just makes life easier to have Zeus (all my systems are named after Greek mythology Gods/Goddesses/Heroes) run the languages I use locally. Not only do I use standard HTML & CSS but I rely heavily upon PHP & MySQL. These were running flawlessly on my 10.4 installation and have been on my iBook (Apollo) for years. I recall last time that I had to compile PHP & MySQL to work on OS X properly but somewhere along the way stumbled upon an article highlighting that Mac OS X comes pre-compiled with both languages, along with an install of Apache.
So I hit Google and came across a great article that highlighted the high-level things about tweaking settings when upgrading to Mac OS X. This was great. It allowed me to get MySQL & PHP up and running quickly. There were a few things missing like session support. Some more searching yielded another resource on how to enable session support in PHP. Combining my knowledge of code development, the first article I found and the correct variables to adjust it was a quick edit.
I will say I did this all in Terminal on my Mac. The thing you must know is that you have to run pico (built in text editor) in admin mode. It’s really easy to be honest. Simply enter sudo pico xxxxxx (where xxxxxx is the filename you wish to edit) and enter your administrator password when asked. Refresh your page to see if it worked. If not, you may have to restart Apache and try again.
It might sound complicated and daunting, but it is quite simple. Now unfortunately there are a few things that still don’t seem to be working correctly and some additional libraries need to be compiled as well. Hopefully I can get away without doing too much to get things working properly. I’ll be sure to let you know what I come across.
Do you have any other suggestions or resources on setting up Mac OS X as local development server? Let me know in the comments.
Posted: January 5th, 2010 by Marshall
| Filed under Code Development
Late last night I was sent a tweet from @CalgaryRealtor – Jim Sparrow, asking for some help for a colleague of his, @jolenta with a Mac related issue. Jim knows that I’ve got nothing but Mac’s at home, and no doubt with my Mac OS X – Snow Leopard upgrade post recently there’s definitely a clue there that I own one.
To make a long story short, it turns out the issue was that whenever a PDF was forwarded to any of Jolenta’s clients or colleagues on a Windows machine, the PDF was corrupt and un-viewable. Well it turned out that Entourage was the culprit.
I’m working on getting a screen shot of the setting (since I don’t run Entourage as my email client) so that you can see the fix. Essentially if you’re running into the issue where you send a file attached to your email in Microsoft Entourage on Mac (obviously since it’s not available on that Windows system) and only Mac users can open it:
- You’ve picked the right users to have as friends and should encourage those with problems to make the switch
- You need to go into the Entourage preferences and adjust the attachment settings from “Mac (Binhex)” to “Any Computer (AppleDouble)”
I see this as a great example of just helping people out and what good the internet has given to the world. I’ve never met Jolenta, nor Jim, yet I made sure that the problem was solved because of trusted communications we’ve had online—in a virtual world essentially.
Have you helped anyone you’ve never met? I’ve even had clients that I’d never met. The world just keeps getting smaller.
Posted: January 3rd, 2010 by Marshall
| Filed under Life, Twitter
For Christmas my brother was kind enough to get me the latest Mac OS X operating system – Snow Leopard. I’d been looking at it for a while so I could finally crack open the iPhone SDK an have a stab at building an app. More on that later of course.
Finally today I decided to go for the upgrade. My development on my uPlay concept had been going in circles the last few days an is definitely ready for POC (proof of concept) so I figured I was safe and wouldn’t lose much…if anything at all.
I slapped the DVD in the drive and launched the installer. Luckily my DVD drive was working as it’s been having some issues lately. The install took about 30 minutes I think…we went to the mall apparently for something important…whatever that was. When I returned I realized that I had installed to a different drive. The default Macintosh HD drive didn’t show for some reason.
So then came the great Migration event. Move three users, a whack of applications and other files/settings. So far the process has been running for almost 3 hours. Yikes! It wouldve been nice to simply point the OS to the drive and have it use the data there WITHOUT copying it over. At the ery least leave the applications there. That’s a couple hinder gigabytes of space I could have kept free. That would’ve been nice. Oh well.
In the past 7 years that I’ve been using a Mac I’ve seen them come a long way and this is the first time I can recall something not going as I’d expected it. On the plus side I’ll be able to run 10.4 or 10.6…in theory…just not sure why I’d want to.
Back to the iPhone app ideas…have you got any simple ones you’d like to see? A buddy of mine, Martin Bowling is working on an app called iDailyBooth for DailyBooth.com. One idea I’ve got is for a good travel clock. Yes, there’s a few in the AppStore but I just want a cool one for me. Like I asked earlier, any apps you’d like to see? Let me know in the comments.
Posted: January 2nd, 2010 by Marshall
| Filed under Life