Information or opinions about Apple hardware and software
Since there are seemingly no simple guides on how to simply install the YUI compressor on Mac, or how to use it in the terminal (command line) as Yahoo’s instructions are useless, and most other guides show how to use it integrated into a website as an on-the-fly processor; if you’d prefer to compress your assets prior to deployment as opposed to on-the-fly then you’ll need to...
Vagrant is a pretty nifty tool that simplifies developing on a Virtual Machine. However it is sometimes not obvious what happens in the background! An example of this is where your VM’s actually get downloaded to, and how they are managed. Since Vagrant acts as a wrapper for VirtualBox (or VMWare Fusion more recently) when you “add” a box, it essentially downloads a pre-built...
In order to access certain aspects of a virtual machine in VirtualBox, you will need to install Guest Additions (similar to VMWare Tools I guess) There is a manual page for installing Guest Additions but not all of it is self-explanatory… First you need to log into your Linux virtual machine (VM) and install/configure x, y and z. Install DKMS This part is relatively straightforward, just...
If for some reason you’ve powered on and while Apache seems to be running OK, lighttp isn’t (for example phpMyAdmin isn’t working on localhost:10081/phpmyadmin) then you will need to start it manually. This is probably caused by a dirty restart, such as a power failure. On Mac OS X run this command… sudo /usr/local/zend/bin/lighttpdctl.sh start For Windows, I’m...
Sometimes if a Samba share (Windows share or a Samba share from Unix) does not disconnect cleanly in Mac OS X, you may end up with a broken symlink in /Volumes/ This means that even if you re-mount the same share, and it will be named the same in the Finder, the actual symlink path won’t be the same. For example if you’re using a Workspace in Eclipse that points to that share, you...
Unlike Windows which doesn't come with Apache by default, or distributions of Linux which (usually) have their own package management systems, Mac OS X comes with an outdated version of Apache which isn't handled by package management. This means it's a pain to either update or remove it.
Whilst trying to figure out why Zend Server CE wasn't working properly on my Mac (again...) I realised that something was wrong with the version of Apache shipped with OS X. Luckily Chris Oliver found the problem in the Apache control script.