Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Over the last year I have been running BusySync to keep my wife’s (Mandy) calendar and my calendar in sync.
It has been working really well. During this time my wife has been using an iMac at our home while I have been using a Mac Book Pro from where ever I happen to be.
Using this method syncing only takes place when both machines are logged in at home on the same network.
Recently I also started using a Mac Pro at home. I now wanted to keep three machines in sync. As the Mac Pro is basically now my main machine with the Mac Book Pro only being used when I am out of the house I decided to reconfigure our calendar syncing so it used BusySync between the iMac and the Mac Pro. As these are in the same house on the same network and almost always on syncing is now very quick.
To keep the Mac Book Pro in sync I have opened a MobileMe account. I use this to sync the Mac Book Pro to the Mac Pro. In turn the Mac Pro will sync with the iMac.
This means if I am now away from home and my wife adds something to the calendar on her machine it will be on the Mac Pro within a few minutes , then as the Mac Pro keeps MobileMe up to date it should be on my Mac Book Pro within an hour.
Overall a pretty pleasing outcome.
As I have never had a .mac account or MobileMe account before I am now beginning to investigate the other syncing options available to keep my desktop and laptop in sync.
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
This is my first post in a long time and I a doing it from San Francisco.
I am here for WWDC.
Arrived yesterday after a 10 and a half hour flight that passed amazingly quickly. I have a policy when flying long haul not to read the film reviews to pick what movies I watch but simply pick the longest. The 747-400 I flew on was reasonably new so had movies on demand even in economy so that was quite nice. Just in case you interested I watched There will be blood (a good 2 and a half hours) and National Treasure: Book of secrets (getting on for 2 hours). Both were quite watchable. I also listened to this weeks episode of Mac Break Weekly which I was really pleased to see was over 2 hours long.
Its now Saturday morning and my body is still adjusting to the 8 hour time difference. I managed to sleep (well forced myself to keep my eyes closed) until about 6am but the body is insisting it is now the afternoon and I should be out of bed. Oh to be a teenager again where the fact of it being the afternoon would have brought no guilt about being in bed.
Going to go to local farmers market today with John and Viola who I am staying with. Then I will begin the task of finding my children Converse All Star shoes.
I will try to post some photos to flickr.
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
I am changing the way I blog.
Ok it would be nice if you just blogged at all might be your first response and I would agree. But once were over that little hurdle I will explain my blogging future.
This blog will become only about myself and my family especially concentrating on our current responsibilities as Church planters.
All geeky posts and techy posts will now be on my company blog at http://www.mamooba.com/blog
Why am I doing this? There are several reasons. Most people will be interested in only one or the other aspects of my life and those who are interested in both wont mind subscribing to both. Also these days a techy blog is an important part of being a micro-ISV so it makes more sense to move techy posts over there.
Friday, January 11th, 2008
I somethings reach my destination, take my laptop (mac Book Pro 17″) out of my bag and find its already awake and consequently a little warn from being wrapped up in its snug environment.
Today I came across an article from Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzch that may solve the mystery.
It seems the lid sensor can sometimes be a little sensitive and certain movements make it think its been opened, which by default wakes the machine up.
A quick command line entry sudo pmset lidwake 0 turns this default off and will hopefully solve the problem. Now when I lift the lid I have to press the main power button to wake the machine up.
Oh life is tough but I think I can get through it!
Friday, January 11th, 2008
I have just posted the latest episode of The Mac Developer Roundtable.
In this episode I discuss the high points of 2007 , Error and Exception Handling and hopes for in 2008 with Daniel Jalkut, Uli Kusterer, Gus Mueller and Guy English
Check it out here
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
The Mac Heist Bundle is back for just $49.
This year it looks like a really tempting software offering.
The guaranteed applications in the bundle are.
1Password
CoverSutra
Cha-Ching
iStopMotion
Awaken
AppZapper
TaskPaper
Once 5000 bundles are sold cssEdit also becomes part of the deal for everybody regardless of when they bought the bundle.
Two other locked application that will be opened up based on the number of bundles sold are SnapX Pro X and Pixelmator.
To total value of the products normally would be $343.75
I already own three of the app in the bundle (1Password, Cha-Ching and cssEdit) so I am going to wait and see if the unlock numbers are reached before I make a final decision but to be honest its almost a no brainer.
Last year there was lots of controversy that the developers where being ripped off. I can only assume that all the developers in the bundle are happy with their deal or their product wouldn’t be there.
The icing on the cake is that 25% of the purchase price is donated to charity.
So the good part of Mac Heist is.
- Developers get new users on terms they must be happy with or they wouldn’t do it.
- Charity get a bucket load of money.
- The people behind Mac Heist get a bucket load of money.
- We get a great software bundle for an absolute bargain price.
The bad side might be if these bundles become to common then maybe people will stop buying Mac Software at normal prices , always waiting for the next bundle. Which in the end will be bad for everyone if developers can’t afford to develop software because no one is willing to pay for it.
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Yesterday Newsgator announced that all their news reading client products would be free from now on.
For Mac users this means today the fabulous NetNewsWire is free where as yesterday it would have cost you $29.95.
I have to be honest and say I’m not sure how I feel about this.
Newsgator say expanding the use of their client products will improve the attraction of their server based offerings. If this is true then future updates to NetNewsWire will hopefully be frequent and maintain the products current excellence.
If however this decision has come because NewGator have just found themselves in a very crowded market space (especially in the open source arena) where its very hard to make money on client software then the future of NetNewsWire maybe a little less certain, which is sad for what I believe is one of the Macs best software offerings.
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
So with PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin in place I could now actually get of with the process on installing
Joomla.
To do this first I needed to create an empty database for the Joomla install to set up and configure. I did this very easily using phpMyAdmin and then created a new user and granted that user all privileges on the new database.
When setting up Joomla it needs to be given a MySQL user to use when it configures the database I had created. It seemed to make more sense to set up a user specifically for this rather than using a user with privileges to other databases as well.
So at last I could actually install Joomla.
First I had choose which build of Joomla 1.5 to download. Joomla 1.5 is at RC4 but you can also download nightly builds. I decided as RC4 is pretty recent that this is what I would look at as its likely to be more stable than the nightly build even though the nightly build may have fixed some bugs in RC4.
Once the single zip file was downloaded , I unpacked it in the ~/Sites folder then renamed the new unpacked folder to Joomla. It turned out the Joomla directory unpacks with no privilages for anyone other than its owner so I had to use “Get Info” to allow others read access before I could install.
I then created a blank file called configuration.php saved it and made sure it had write permissions.
With all this in place installing Joomla was actually very simple. I simply navigated to my Joomla folder in Safari (http://127.0.0.1/~Scotty/Joomla/) and it recognized itself as a new install and began the installation process.
First I was asked to choose a language before Joomla did a pre-instaltion check to make sure everything was in place for a successful install.
The checks made where for
PHP Version >= 4.3.10,
Zlib Compression Support,
XML Support,
MySQL Support,
MB Language is Default,
String Overload Off
configuration.php Writable.
Joomla also checked my setting and advised on if they matched Joomlas recommend settings which are
Safe Mode: Off
Display Errors: On
File Uploads: On
Magic Quotes Runtime: Off
Register Globals: Off
Output Buffering: Off
Session Auto Start: Off
With this done I had to read the license and accept it before Joomla asked me for my database settings.
It wanted to know the database type (MySql), the hostname (in my case localhost), the MySql username and password Joomla should use to set up the database, and which database it should configure. (Remember Joomla wont create a database only configure one , which is why we created one earlier).
Once Joomla has the database details you have the option of supplying it with some FTP details and enabling its FTP Layer.
In use Joomla needs to upload data ,images, files etc. Running as the default web user it is unlikely to have all the privileges its need to do this (or if it does the site wont be very secure). So by giving Joomla and FTP user and password details it can use for these uploads you can configure your system to give that use the required permissions while leaving the web exposed stuff secure. As this is a test installation on my local machine I will just set the folder privileges to allow joomla to work.
Next Joomla required a site name, an email address for the site administrator and an admin password. At this point you also get the option to install some sample data. If you don’t know much about Joomla I highly recommend you do this as a blank Joomla install is quite a daunting experience.
And thats it, Joomla was installed. Before I could use it properly Joomla required me to delete (or rename) the Installation folder found in its home directory as a security measure.
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Today I set about installing Joomla RC 1.5 onto my Mac Book Pro running OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard).
In order to to do this I have needed to enable PHP , Instal MySQL and phpMyAdmin before even getting as far as down loading and installing Joomla. I thought others might find the process (and Web Articles I used useful) So here goes.
Lots of blogs say that Leopards implementation is incomplete but I decided to stick with it until I find I need something it doesn’t have. Before I could use Leopards PHP I needed to enable it. I did this using a text editor to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to make sure the LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so line was not commented out. (Its commented out if it begins with a # , and can be uncommented by simply removing the #).
Next I needed to make sure apache was running by going to System Preferencesand choosing Sharing and making sure Web Sharing was active by ticking the check box.
I then created a simple php text page and saved it as Test.php in the ~/Sites folder under my home directory. I could then test PHP was operational by using a browser and navigating to http://127.0.0.1/~Scotty/Test.php (Scotty is my user name on my Mac Book Pro)
For more info on setting up a PHP website on an OS X box try Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) - Professional PHP
So with PHP up running next I need to install MySQL.
At the time of writing the MySQL web site had a dmg image for Tiger but apparently it has a few problems on Leopard. After doing a bit of reading it seemed the best way of getting MySQL onto a Leopard machine was to download the source , compile and install it. Now I’m no command line geek so I was definitely looking for help here and fortunately found it in an article called Installing MySQL on Mac OS X at Hivelogic. This article takes you through the entire process including downloading the source from the command line. The whole process I have to say went pretty smoothly.
I then set up a user called Scotty in mysql by using the terminal to go into mysql
mysql -uroot
and typing the following
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO Scotty@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'myPassword'
With MySQL installed and hopefully configured enough for PHP and phpMyAdmin it was time to have a go at installing phpMyAdmin where I discovered a problem with PHP and MySQL on Leopard. This problem boils down to the location of the location of the mysql.sock file. I did a bit of googling and read a number of ways to deal with this but I tried the one detailed in Working with PHP 5 in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) - Professional PHP
The problem seemed to be that the default location for the mysql.sock file has now moved to the /var/mysql directory. PHP will look for it there. Unfortunately, the default location where it is placed by MySQL is still the old location. I fixed this by creating a my.cnf configuration file in the /etc directory and saved the file with the following contents
[client]
socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
[mysqld]
socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
In the terminal window I then created the folder and set its access rights using
sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo chown _mysql /var/mysql
So with done I could get back to installing phpMyAdmin. First I downloaded phpMyAdmin from here Once downloaded I unpacked the file to the ~/Sites folder under my home folder and renamed the extracted directory from phpMyAdmin-2.11.3-english to phpMyAdmin.
Next I edited the config.sample.inc.php file in the phpAdmin directory and changed the line $cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ''; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */ so that it contained a value $cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'ba17c1ec07d65003'; /. I then saved the file as config.inc.php
Then in Safari I navigated to http://127.0.0.1/~Scotty/phpMyAdmin/ which presented me with a log in screen in which I set the user as Scotty and used the password I set when I granted all privileges to Scotty@localhost earlier when setting up MySQL and voila , a working phpMyAdmin.
So at last I could actually get round to installing Joomla.
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Its a well known reality that we often know what’s right but only when we are really faced with it do we accept a real decision has to be made.
What makes me say this?. Well I’ve known how standard chickens are reared for many years as has my wife and even my children have at least been partially aware of the terrible conditions in which chickens are bred. However despite knowing this we have continued to purchase standard chickens from the supermarket because you can often get two for £5 where as you will pay £7 for one free range bird.
The power of money out weighs the power of right!.
The reality is we prefer not to think about what gets in the way. Yes, we think it’s wrong to mistreat animals that we are going to eat but as we don’t see it everyday we somehow manage to put it out of our mind just enough that when at the supermarket we can continue to buy chickens reared in bad conditions while whole heartedly agreeing with people at dinner parties that mistreating animals is wrong.
This week channel four have been showing a series of programs called Hugh’s Chicken Run that has presented over three hours on this subject. After watching this as a family we have decided its time to stop being hypocrites, stand up for what’s right and only buy free range chicken.
The reality is our family budget will not allow us to eat the same amount of chicken at higher prices which means this meat loving family has taken the difficult decision to simply eat less meat.
Will we miss it?, of course we will. But its doing the right thing with the the little things and not just the big ones that will eventually make the world a better place to live for man and chicken.