Macintosh – Page 3 – Garrick van Buren

Setting up a Web Development Environment in Tiger

This message means the upgrade is complete.

Last week I started the upgrade Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” around the house. To my pleasant surprise, it went extremely smoothly. The most tedious and frustrating part was waiting for my newly enclosed external hard drive to copy tens of gigs of files back and forth for 2 machines.

The upgrade was an excellent opportunity to clean house and back up. Something my Powerbook was sorely in need of. After the install, the ease of copying my Home directory and a handful of required applications (NetNewsWire, Transmit, VooDooPad, BluePhoneElite, Skype, SubEthaEdit, Quicksilver) back to the laptop meant I was 85% back to normal almost immediately.

The tough part was getting the web development playground set up; I’ve still got a week left in the 21 days of Ruby, and I’m lost without a local install of PHP.

After un-commenting the PHP modules in Tiger’s default Apache install and setting the permissions on the items within the /WebServer/Documents directory to 666, PHP was working as expected.

After that, Ruby, Rails, and MySQL. For this, I highly recommend TextDrive’s About “Setting up a development environment on my Mac”. It walked me through everything and like everything at TextDrive – straight-forward and friendly. As of this writing, some of the items are specific to 10.3 “Panther” and I was able to skip over those with no consequence. Without it, I’d still be googling for a good tutorial on setting everything up. Now, I’m ready to rebuild my seemingly broken WishRSS.

Waiting for Tiger in Roseville

Yesterday, Jen asked if I needed anything at the mall. I had already placed my order for Tiger at Amazon, so I was good.

I decided to join her anyway, and stop by the other electronics big boxes scouring for a USB- or Firewire- powered 3.5″ hard drive enclosure. No luck on that yet, but I still have to hit the Micro Center in St. Louis Park.

As we walked by the Roseville Apple Store, I shot the above photo of the queue waiting to for official Tiger release. It’s nothing like Julio’s movie of the queue at the Mall of America.

How to Set Up a Linksys Router with Mac OS X

“INSERT CD FIRST”, screamed the sticker on the back of the Linksys wrt54g router.

A decade with Macintoshes has taught me the suggestions are normally for Windows machines. The router was persistent – and the sticker was blocking the power port – so, I thought I’d humor it. I was right. The CD shipping was filled with setup software for Windows. Nothing about how to setup from a Macintosh. Anywhere.

Everyone at Amazon said I’d be up and running in seconds. The Linksys site barely acknowledges Macintoshes exist.

Here’s the steps I took to setup a Linksys Router with Mac OS X

Peel off the sticker on the back of the router.
Plug in the router’s power cord.
Connect the router to your modem via the supplied Ethernet cord and the port marked ‘Internet’.
Connect the router to your Mac via Ethernet.
Open up the ‘Network’ panel in the Mac’s System Preferences and plug-in the following specs:

IP Address: 192.168.1.5 Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0 Router: 192.168.1.1
After applying the settings, open a browser to http://192.168.1.1 using the password 'admin'

Now you’re in the router’s control panel. Enter all your ISP’s settings and name your new wireless network something other than ‘linksys’.

Now you’ll finally be able to program from the gazebo in your backyard.

Introducing Tag Maker for MarsEdit

I’m a big fan of MarsEdit, I use it for all my weblog posting. The other day, I was wondering about making any arbitrary text a Technorati Tag.

The result was the Tag Maker Applescript for MarsEdit.

It takes any selected text and appends a ‘(t)’ to it linking to the corresponding tag at Technorati, or a ‘(d)’ for del.icio.us tags. For example: MarsEdit (t), Applescript (t d).

Download the Tag Maker AppleScript

For suggestions, comments, and all other ongoing concerns with this plugin, head over to the Tag Maker dedicated page

A Mac Mini in the Living Room

Since the release of the Mac Mini, I’ve been looking for reasons to pick one up. Currently, there’s a G4 tower in my basement and I’d like to return it to the 20th Century.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

Plug the Mac Mini into my TV, and use either the El Gato EyeTV Wonder or Plextor ConvertX as a personal video recorder.
Use the KeySpan Remote Control to control the PVR, the Mini’s DVD player, iTunes, iPhoto, and Skype from the couch
Use the Mini as a file server and WiFi base station to the rest of the computers on the network

In theory, it sounds pretty slick, a true Digital Hub. In practice, I’m less optimistic. I’d rather not have to navigate the Mac OS from the couch.

Two things require further investigation:

Can a specific key on the KeySpan can be mapped to each of the applications?
Are the PVRs reliable with broadcast, over-the-air TV?

Has anyone tried something like this in their own home?