LinOSX TechnoMash

I’ve recently gotten back into some development and needed to run MySQL on my Leopard computers. The easy way out was downloading and running MAMP (a great pre-built package of Apache and MySQL). Unfortunately, I hated starting the Apache and MySQL daemons manually.

I created OS X launchctl scripts to start Apache and MySQL but I hated the fact that I was maintaining two installations of Apache (the one that comes with OS X and the MAMP one). I wanted one simple installation of everything that would start automatically. Also, occasionally, weird things would happen with permissions and I’d have to shut everything down and restart again.

It’s been some time since I compiled my own software so I was looking forward to compiling MySQL from scratch. The first thing I found was this great post on Hivelogic about compiling MySQL. I’m not going to regurgitate what’s in the post but I’m going to highlight the configure flags for Leopard. Most times, when compiling applications, getting all the flags right is the only way to ensure your specific OS and architecture are properly supported in the compilation process and it’s the only way to squeeze out the best performance.


CC=gcc CFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer" CXX=gcc \
CXXFLAGS="-O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors \
-fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client \
--enable-local-infile --enable-shared


Make sure you change your root (data base administrator password) by running:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h localhost password 'new-password'

Don’t forget to secure your server as indicated on HiveLogic.

My plist file for automatically launching MySQL under MAMP is here. Feel free to compare it to the post at HiveLogic or change it to suit your needs. If you have any suggestions on how to improve it, please let me know.

A splinter dev team released iBrickr for Windows and Apple OS X to jailbreak Apple iPhones with firmware 1.1.13. This jailbreak will only work on phones that have been upgraded from firmware 1.02 to 1.1.1 or 1.1.2 and then to 1.1.3. This jailbreak will NOT work on OTB (Outta The Box) 1.1.3 iPhones. As with all jailbreaks and other hacks, you could very easily end up with a nice $400 paperweight, so be very careful if you decide that you absolutely must jailbreak your iPhone.

Be warned that this jailbreak DOES NOT allow unlocking of 1.1.3 iPhones. There is currently no unlock for the 1.1.3. It’s possible that IPSF will work but so far, there hasn’t been any confirmation. If you need any unlocked iPhone stay with 1.1.1.

Get info and download iBrickr for Apple OS X here and you can download iBrickr for Windows here.

After downloading from iTunes and watching episode 3 of the second season of Sleeper Cell: American Terror, my MacBook completely froze up and wouldn’t respond to anything. I don’t think it was some terrorist plot to thwart my viewing of Sleeper Cell but I was forced to power off the machine and since then I haven’t gotten the machine to boot up. The MacBook displays the blinking folder with a question mark in it. This means, the MacBook doesn’t recognize that a hard drive is present.

I called Apple support in the US and they are pretty sure the hard drive is dead. I’ve sent an email to Apple in New Delhi with my case number and I’m waiting to hear back from them about salvaging any data on the drive, if possible, a replacement drive, and OS X 10.4 installation disks since I don’t have my install disks with me in New Delhi. I hope to hear back from them ASAP as I need to finish the second season of Sleeper Cell

Update Juney 28th, 2006: I went to Apple Care Delhi on Monday and had the MacBook tested. The drive was not being detected in Target mode or or with the Disk Utility so a new drive was ordered and delivered on Wednesday. I had to call Apple in the US to request OS X Tiger replacement disks which were also delivered on Wednesday. Apple was also very quick about re-enabling my iTunes account to download any of the music and shows that were not backed up. Overall, a real pain and lost a lot of data but the MacBook is up and running again.

Lenovo is offering users of ThinkPads and other Lenovo products who purchased their PC between October 26th, 2006 and March 15th, 2007 a free upgrade to Windows Vista. Take a look here. Personally, I would rather pay for an upgrade that would allow Apple OS X to run natively on my ThinkPad T60.

Ok, well, Steve got up on stage yesterday and spent an hour woo’ing journalists and bloggers for the second time in about two months. Every other major tech blog and tech news site has covered the presentation with pictures so I’m not going to regurgitate the same old news. Instead, I’ll regurgitate my opinions on what’s the reason for the fanfare around yesterday’s event.

1. Every one saw the movie downloads via iTunes coming so no big deal here. Personally, I’d be a bit more excited if these downloads were DVD quality. However, that would make the downloads too big for most people to really purchase. I’ll probably purchase a movie jsut to see what it looks like on my MacBook and Mac Mini.
2. Rumors that the Nano was going to be updated with iPod Mini-like colors have been circulating for quite some time. No big deal here.
3. We were all expecting a major update to the iPod. Coming out with a 80GB iPod, replacing the 60GB one, and making it brighter is a bit of a snoozer. An event when the infamous iPhone or “true” video iPod actually make it out the door will actually suffer from the “Boy who cried wolf”-syndrome. Apple’s had too many of these special announcement events without really wowing journalists, bloggers, users, and Wall Street.
4. Games on my phone. Games on my iPod. Games will be a big money maker but I think Apple has them priced a bit too high relative to where most cell phone games are priced.
5. iTV - This is pretty cool but I really don’t want another device to deal with. Apple can live up to their reputation of being an innovator if the iTV was combined into a digital living room version of the Mac Mini. Now, I can have my computer and digital entertainment device together with hardware and software support from Apple. I can have PiP (Picture in Picture) support of digital mobile movies (DVD and downloaded), digital tv shows (DVD and downloaded), broadcast/cable/satellite tv, and my computer. Build in the Miglia TV Mini HD into this device and I now have a built in HDTV support. This is a device I’d pick up really fast.

I’m a bit bored of the news coming out of Apple recently. I still think Apple is a great company and I expect it to do really well but Apple has set the bar really high and the expectations people have of Apple’s ability to innovate seem to be disconnected with the reality of what Apple is able to deliver in a short time frame. No question about Steve Jobs’ ability to market Apple’s products but Apple is becoming a victim of their own marketing success.

We want more and we want it faster than ever from Apple. Can Apple deliver?

CodeWeavers yesterday released a public beta of CroosOver Mac. A list of the supported applications is here. I downloaded and installed it yesterday. CrossOver Mac installed without issue on my Apple MacBook. Once it was installed, I installed, Word 2003, Excel 2003, and PowerPoint 2003 from Microsoft Office 2003 Professional. All three applications were working without incident with very light testing.

I was not able to install Visio 2000. I haven’t looked into why the installation was failing yet but I will try in more detail and post a bug report if it still doesn’t work. My next application to install will be Quicken 2006 Premier Home and Business.

Go on and download CrossOver Mac from CodeWeavers and give it a whirl.

CodeWeavers - CrossOver Mac

I’ve had my MacBook for over two months now. The more I use OS X, I really like it. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts here, here and here, I like the simplicity, I like the ease of use, I like the *nix foundation underlying the pretty user interface, I like the choice between commercial and open source applications and I love the stability.

I’ve been using my MacBook quite a bit the last few weeks working from cafes, Starbucks, parks, and other places where a wired Internet connection isn’t available. The MacBook has been connecting to the Internet just fine. However, the laptop gets way too hot to hold on my lap for more than a few minutes. The other day, I had to put a piece of wood under my MacBook to protect the plastic table cover from burning.

The sharp edge right below the trackpad…. Ouch! The more and more I type, I find my hands getting chaffed by the edge. It’s fine if i’m sitting on my bed and the laptop is also on the bed (craning my neck downwards becomes a different issue). If I’m sitting at a table or at a desk, and my wrists are resting on the edge of the MacBook, the laptop becomes less and less comfortable on the hands. I’m longing more and more for a ThinkPad running OS X. People have gotten OS X to run on ThinkPads and people are discussing it here.
I might decide to keep my MacBook for non-strenuous short uses and I might decide to either get my ThinkPad T40 fixed, or get an X series to carry around. Not sure that I want to spend the money on a new laptop right now since I just bought the MacBook. I will probably do some research to see if I can get a T60 motherboard with a Intel Core Duo 2 GHz chip put into the T40 chassis. I have no idea what that’s going to cost to do.

Lenovo, if you’re reading this, give Steve Jobs a call ad get him to license OS X for the ThinkPad!!!! You’ll probably wind up selling more ThinkPads than IBM ever did

technorati tags:ThinkPad, MacBook, os x, Apple, Lenovo, Laptop

Google recently release a Picasa uploader for the Mac thanks to Ted Bonkenburg. Ted worked on this during his twenty-percent time at Google. Hopefully, this means Picasa for Mac will be out soon too. At least there’s a Linux version which is pretty cool. So far, I’m a bit partial to Flickr

It’s all about the photos…on a Mac8/02/2006 11:57:00 AMPosted by Ted Bonkenburg, Software Engineer, InfrastructureI’m happy to tell you about the release of Picasa Web Albums Uploaders (beta, of course) for Mac OS X. Picasa Web Albums makes it simple to share photos with friends and family, and now we’ve made it even easier on the Mac. This new download comes with two handy tools for uploading photos: There’s a plug-in for uploading your pics within iPhoto.

Official Google Blog: It’s all about the photos…on a Mac

technorati tags:Picasa, Mac, os x, Apple, Photo Sharing, Uploader

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I’ve been playing with the preinstalled Quicken 2006 for Mac after exporting most of my data from Quicken 2006 Premier Home and Business 2006 for Windows.

Quicken for Mac is annoying and cumbersome at best. After using it for two days, I am amazed at why Intuit even bothers with this version. It is extremely painful to navigate and since it’s not a Universal binary, it’s pretty slow. It’s virtually impossible to find all the functions and features. It is so different from the Windows version that it appears to have been written by a different product team that decided to develop a completely different product. I agree that there are some things that should be done with the UI to take advantage of the native OS that the app is running on. However, if you’re going to do that, think it through very carefully. The Quicken for Mac developers haven’t thought it through at all.

Since Quicken for Mac is horrible, I was poking around to see if there’s a version of Wine for OS X. The guys at CodeWeavers are going to be releasing a version of CrossOver Office for the Mac but no one knows when.

I came across Darwine, an OS X port of Wine. Darwine installed perfectly on my MacBook. The helper application even let me install Quicken Premier Home and Business 2006 for Windows. When I tried to launch Quicken, I got the same error that I’ve been getting on CrossOver Office for many many months - “Your Quicken program files (not your data files) may have been damaged. You will have to reinstall Quicken”. Looks like the CrossOver Office problem is upstream in Wine itself (just today, I was able to get QPHAB working on Suse 10.1 with CrossoverOffice 5.0.1).

Though I would love to have a complete native version of Quicken on the Mac, I can’t hold my breath for Intuit. They were never respnsive to the Linux community’s request for a Linux version so there’s no reason to believe they’ll listen to all the Mac users asking for a complete version for OS X. Until then, I look forward to having Wine meet my needs.

technorati tags: Intuit, Quicken, OS X