JD Tangney & Associates

Ecto

So it's a holiday, and what better way to spend it than fiddling with an app on a Mac?

I looked around – once again – for a better blog posting client than ecto. The only contender is blogo. It's very nice, but it lacks some of the power features of ecto like a twitter plugin (I still don't have that working..), the ability to ping a bunch of servers, and, most important, custom HTML tags for doing stuff like posting code. Sure, you can hand-edit the HTML, but that gets very old very quickly.

So back to ecto. Time to pimp it up and get all the gibblies to work together. The UI has always frustrated me. Nothing is where I expect it to be. But at least this version (3.0b55) is reasonably stable.

Now, having got it the way I want it, I need to set it up again on my desktop machine. What a pain! I copied the .plist file from ~/Library/Preferences to the other Mac, but some things are still not there, like the list of servers to ping. With a little digging and some help from sudo fs_usage -filesys |fgrep -i ecto I see that all that stuff lives in ~Library/Application Support/ecto3/accounts.plist Bingo!

Labels: macos

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PHP and FMP

Get FM_API_for_PHP_Standalone from within the FM server download. Use the trial if necessary.

Expand it and copy it into /usr/local/php/fmp. Make the parent directories as needed

Copy /etc/php.ini.default to/etc/php.ini

Edit php.ini. Uncomment and modify include_path = ".:/usr/local/php/includes"

I set up eclipse by copying the features and plugins after downloading from http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/downloads/ I couldn't get the update site to work (mysterious errors.) Finally, after messing with it for ages, I concluded that Eclipse PDT doesn't work with Ganymede. I now use PHPEclipse.

For debugging, we need xdebug. Oopsie. Must install pear to get pecl to get xdebug.

So,

curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear > go-pear.php
sudo php -q go-pear.php

Let the script update php.ini. And don't forget to update PATH like the script told you to.

Then it's

sudo pecl install xdebug

And do NOT do what it says (You should add "extension=xdebug.so" to php.ini")

Instead, add this:

[xdebug]
zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/xdebug.so

Then confirm that it's working by doing php -mxdebug will show up both under [PHP Modules] and [Zend Modules] Get phpUnit installed. See Sebastian Bergmann's site: http://www.phpunit.de/manual/3.3/en/installation.html

sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.desudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

Labels: filemaker, macos, php

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AFP and Bonjour on DS-107+

Here are some notes I took when getting a Synology DS-107+ to play nicely on an all-Mac network. I installed an AFP server and mDNS daemon, also known as Bonjour or Zeroconf.

The first pitfall: Use firefox - bugs prevent proper privileges and path installation if you use Safari.

Instal EnableSSH. See Synology's instructions

Check "Hide this share in My Network Places". This prevents them from being published as samba shares. They're still accessible via samba, and AFS only publishes to people who have access anyway.

Install ipkg by following the instructions on Maarten Damen's site

If you're a Unix geek, you'll recognize ipkg as being a package manager something along the lines of Debian's apt or the Mac port, fink.

We'll install avahi next. It's the Bonjour bit. The ipkg install is in the "unstable" tree so we need to tell ipkg about it by adding

src http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/syno-x07/cross/unstable

to /opt/etc/ipkg.conf

Then avahi will install by simply running

ipkg install avahi

We need to give avahi the wherewithal to boot and be useful. I found that the slackware distro has the closest to what I wanted.

Copy the init script from

/avahi-0.6.22/initscript/slackware/avahi-daemon.in to /opt/etc/init.d

Also change the @sbindir@ to /opt/sbin

This is easiest if you mount /opt via smb (the share is published by ipkg bootstrap)

Start all the daemons by running

/opt/etc/rc.optware

In /opt/etc/avahi/services

delete sftp-ssh.service and replace with afpd.service:

(see http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Share_Directories_via_AFP)

Hacked the S20dbus script in /opt/etc/init.d to NOT check for pid file. I think the pid is not properly cleaned up on shutdown so dbus fails to boot. This causes it to run, which allows avahi to run too.

Labels: macos, synology

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Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Add more power to 10.5's screen sharing

[From Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Add more power to 10.5's screen sharing]

I live by VNC, since we are a distributed XP team. So I was thrilled when I found this MacWorld article on tweaking the build-in VNC client on Leopard.

Now if only it would get over some of its temperamentality so I can use it reliably over an SSH tunnel or to a non-Mac machine.

Labels: macos, xp

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Leopard: Connect As... does nothing

In Finder, Connect As says "Connecting" but does nothing. That's because NetAuthAgent is dead or wedged. See this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5785124#5785124

The only cure I can find is to log out/in again.

Labels: macos

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Getting Postfix running on Leopard

1) Enable the service by changing the "disabled" flag in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist I just use Lingon for this.

2) Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and uncomment and edit this line:

myhostname = host.domain.tld
Also uncomment this line:
myorigin = $mydomain
That's it!

Labels: macos

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Country and Western
I now have two old(er) Macs with two different accelerators. Interesting contrast! Both the Sonnet Crescendo (800 MHz G4 installed in an old 8500) and Powerlogix PowerForce (1.x GHz G4 in stalled in a sawtooth G4) work flawlessly and installation was easy. The installation dox from Sonnet were better. The Sonnet web site and product lit made it easy to determine which unit to buy. (And Amazon's vague description made for a good price!) Powelogix, by comparison, use different product descriptions in the main part of their web site and the online store. Most confusing. Regardless, I now have two fast(er) Macs where I only had an aged, slow one before.

Labels: macos

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