Internet Explorer is the bane of my life.

Internet Explorer is the bane of my life. Need I say more.

Every time I look up a standard for HTML / CSS / Javascript, it works on every browser I have, except Internet Explorer. Almost consistently. It is just terrible.

Wordle and Delicious

I've been using delicious for a while to bookmark things i find interesting.... This page generates a word map of your interests based on the tags you use in delicious.

I think it's a pretty accurate reflection of my interests.... don't you?



Anyone interested can look into my bookmarks at:

http://del.icio.us/soundevolution

-matt

MacBook Pro Internal Hard Drive Upgrade

Today, I upgraded the internal hard drive in my MacBook Pro, using Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer all the data from the old drive to a new one. It wasn't all smooth sailing, but now it's done.

I got the new drive and placed it in a SATA-USB case and formatted it correctly using Disk Utility (with GUID partition table). Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to transfer everything from the old drive to the new drive.

I tested the new drive by trying to restart with it as the boot disk, (in the USB case). It started booting, but then suddenly restart half way through booting.

I had an appointment with an Apple retailer/service centre to do the upgrade, since I had read that the installation was quite tricky. So I went ahead and got the drive installed - placing the old drive in the SATA-USB case.

So, still no full booting... crash restart half way through. I tried again using single user mode (CMD+S during initial boot) and noticed an error message about `devfs`.

I booted of the old drive and noticed that the new drive was missing '/dev/'. I created this, making sure to copy the permissions and user:owner as on the old drive:

sudo mkdir /Volumes/NewDrive/dev
sudo chmod 666 /Volumes/NewDrive/dev
sudo chown root:wheel /Volumes/NewDrive/dev

I also noticed that '/.vol' was missing, so I repeated the process for that directory.

After that, the system boots correctly off the internal drive. There's still something funky going on just as the Finder loads, but I haven't figured that out yet.

And using CCC is certainly a lot faster than reinstalling from scratch (including all applications!).

Good luck to all,
Matt

Installing MySQL 5 on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Installing MySQL 5.0 was fairly simply on Mac OS X Leopard, with a view caveats:

1. For some reason, MySQL didn't start properly until I rebooted the machine. After installation, I could start and stop the mysql server from the command line (Terminal) but not from the preferences pane. After a restart it all works normally.

2. PHP in Leopard looks for the mysql socket in a different place. So I created a symlink to point back to MySQL 5's default location. Hopefully this allows for both old and new systems to work together regardless of where they expect the socket to be:


sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
sudo chown _mysql /var/mysql/mysql.sock
sudo chmod 777 /var/mysql/mysql.sock


Now the PHP is talking to MySQL.

Don't forget to enable PHP in the web server. To do this, edit the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and remove the comments on this line:

LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so