Recently in Hints & Tips Category

I’m normally quite happy with the standard Apache setup on my Mac’s and the simplicity with which MySQL installs makes it still the easiest platform to setup a development machine on. In fact we can do nearly all of our web app development on stock standard Mac’s as it gives a good base platform that compares favourably with most of our clients servers at various hosting providers.

For most of the software we develop is happy running under the default User and Group ( _www:_www ) for Apache, recently though we had to upgrade a third party extension that runs a few shell exec routines. In our Mac based world this presented a few problems as the _www user doesn’t normally come with a home directory and therefore no way to setup things like, ssh keys.

(Please don’t undertake these changes if you aren’t aware of how this changes the security of your computer.)

1. Open Terminal.
2. Navigate to the directory in question.
3. type “find . -type f | wc -l”
4. Press “Return/Enter”

That’s it.

ps. this will also count all the files in any sub-directories of the one you’re currently in.

Have you ever wanted to find the technical specifications of that Mac you’ve been using for the last couple of years? All you need is the Serial number (eg. YM0000XXEUH ) or even the model number (eg. MC561LL/A ).

As you would expect Apple have a support page that provides just what you need, what you may not have noticed is that it will use your products serial number to find the exact product specifications you’re after.

Keep reading if you need to find your serial number…

Like a lot of businesses we use an internal OS X Server for a variety of functions — one of them is to provide a local caching DNS service.

Also like other business we use BIND’s ability to serve up ‘views’ to let us have custom internal web addresses reflecting internal servers.

Occasionally, we need to add a new address to our private view and I never remember to drop the TTL ( time to live ) down to a shorter period. (Actually remember is the wrong word — usually I don’t get any warning that a new internal address is needed :D ).

As I don’t do this on a daily basis I can never remember how I cleared out the DNS cache previously — hence this post.

For the most part between my mail servers and the Mac OS X Mail application 99% of SPAM sent to me goes straight to the Junk mail folder never to be seen by me.

Sadly every now and again, an otherwise reputable organisation that I’ve never heard of seems to go out an buy a block of email addresses and add it to their newsletter mailing list. This of course will usually get past any spam filters.

So, being the zero tolerance grumpy old bastard I am, here’s a quick tip for immediately reporting them to the ACMA.

Whoa! That's a long time between posts.

Of course something significant must be happening to generate another post and as the title of this post indicates it's Snow Leopard. As you're probably already aware Snow Leopard is due to hit tomorrow - Friday 28th August 2009, up to a month before most developers expected it. Snow Leopard is expected to be a significant polishing exercise for the OS and the user experience - so it means there will be software that doesn't work in Snow Leopard. To avoid the problems many people experienced upgrading to Leopard I thought I'd better recount my efforts todate.

Now for most major applications the transition should be relatively painless especially if they're up-to-date. However, it wasn't the front of screen applications that brought down users upgrading to Leopard nearly 2 years ago. It was a system extensions/hack that really made a mess of things for some people.

Recently I had to re-install my CS4 upgrade and hit a strange error, opening the "Setup" application resulted in the normal request for Authentication, as shown below. The problem is, nothing else happened - the dialog box went away and literally nothing happened.

Just call me a sucker, I always tell friends, family, anyone that asks in fact - research the web seller BEFORE you buy from them. Don't trust them unless you've dealt with them recently. If it's been awhile since you used them checkout their reputation - if only I'd done that, I'd be in a much better place.

Screensavers are one of those things that have really passed their original reason for coming into existence, ie. to prevent an image from burning into your cathode ray based computer monitor. Since then they've evolved into entertainment and infotainment systems providing everything from photo slideshows to RSS feeds to just pretty graphics. Some are even interactive like Soundstream...

A few month's ago I wrote about ways to navigate around mail without using the mouse - and I promised to bring you a second article on navigating around inside the body of an email. Well, thanks to a gentle reminder (thanks Brian) here it is.