I heard a single click. Fear strikes! I try to play a track in iTunes since it is already open… Beachball of death! Fear turns to terror. I immediately shut it off, and waited a while, each second seemed like an eternity as thoughts of life without my powerbook streamed through my head.

I figure there is no use in trying to boot it back up. I pop in my Tiger install DVD and boot off of it, so far so good. Launch the Disk Utility. I hear a nightmarish grinding noise from under my left palm. Panic!

After some time passed during the grinding from hell, it stopped and displayed my drive with no volumes contained. Anxiety!

I click on the drive and look at the partition tab and see emptiness. Horror!

Launch Terminal and type _dmesg_ and see ??disk4: I/O Error??. Screach! Wail! and finally depression.

Life without my powerbook is not worth living.

But then I realize this is complete death, but only a kind of amnesia. Too bad it is too late to buy a new hard drive. I quickly get online w/ my _winblows_ box that is normally only running World of Warcraft. Checking site after site for prices on a new drive. This is an emergency, I can’t wait for shipping. So I bought a new 60G drive for pickup at CompUSA. Check their store hours… Damn! They don’t open until 10AM.

It is obvious that I didn’t sleep very well.

The next morning I pack my amnesiac laptop and a few extra tools and *drive* to work. I hate driving. Especially to work. But I am willing to sacrifice my comfort for my beloved “Pi”. The first hour at work w/o my baby was dreadful. Watching the clock every second.

9:45AM… Race to CompUSA and get there very shortly after they open. Run up to the counter and ask for my new drive. Race back to work crack open my laptop.

Damn there are a lot of screws, and at least 14 different types before I get to the battery. Erg. Oh well, no one said brain surgery would be easy.

Finally get the new drive in and Pi all closed up. Booted her up w/ the new install DVD. Wonderful, everything works great!

Now it is time to reaclimate Pi to it’s former life. Unfortunately I didn’t have a full backup (that was planned for the future), but at least I had my home directory tarred up on my iPod.

Install OS, Apps, Software Update, etc, etc. Restore most of my home directory. And hours later I have my baby back. New and improved with an even longer memory (40G -> 60G).

Yay! He’s gonna be just fine.

1. We need to get a copy of the website. Run this to synchronize you computer with the current site.

   rsync -avzC --timeout=600 --delete --delete-after  \
   --include='manual/en/' --include='manual/en/**'  \
   --exclude='manual/**' --exclude='distributions/manual/**'  \
   --exclude='distributions/**' --exclude='extra/**' \
   rsync.php.net::phpweb /Library/WebServer/Documents/php
   

2. Add SQLite support if necessary. pear install SQLite
3. Setup the Apache VirtualHost:
   Save this in a file called /etc/httpd/users/php.conf

   NameVirtualHost *:80
   <VirtualHost *:80>
   </VirtualHost>
   <VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName php
        ServerAdmin webmaster@domainname.com                                                                  
   
        # Webroot of PHP mirror site
        DocumentRoot /Library/WebServer/Documents/php                                                       
   
        # These PHP settings are necessary to run a mirror
        php_value include_path .:/Library/WebServer/Documents/php/include
        php_flag register_globals on                                                                        
   
        # Log server activity
        ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/php-error_log
        TransferLog /var/log/httpd/php-access_log                                                           
   
        # Set directory index
        DirectoryIndex index.php index.html                                                                 
   
        # Do not display directory listings if index is not present,
        # and do not try to match filenames if extension is omitted
        Options -Indexes -MultiViews                                                                        
   
        # Handle errors with local error handler script
        ErrorDocument 401 /error.php
        ErrorDocument 403 /error.php
        ErrorDocument 404 /error.php                                                                        
   
        # Add types not specified by Apache by default
        AddType application/octet-stream .chm .bz2 .tgz
        AddType application/x-pilot .prc .pdb                                                               
   
        # Set mirror's preferred language here
        SetEnv MIRROR_LANGUAGE "en"
        # Turn spelling support off (which would break URL shortcuts)
        <IfModule mod_speling.c>
          CheckSpelling Off
        </IfModule>
   </VirtualHost>
   

4. run sudo apachectl graceful
5. Add a php alias to you hosts file. Edit /etc/hosts. Add “php” to the end of the line that starts with “127.0.0.1″
6. In order to get updates you can run the first command any time you want, or if you are running Tiger you can copy this file into ~/Library/LaunchAgents/net.php.mirror.plist. This will cause it to be updated daily.

This led me to decide to write my own script so I could do even more. My script will set your iChat status to the active application, or the current track info if it is actually playing. As an added bonus it also posts the track info as a new post to my website.

You will need to save this script as an Application Bundle with the Stay Open option. If you are annoyed at it’s existence in the Dock you can modify the Info.plist file in the Contents folder and add:

       <key>NSUIElement</key>
	<string>1</string>

iTunesStatus.txt

Here is a quick rundown of what I did.

If fink is installed you may install these optional and very useful libraries

  fink install mysql-client mysql14-dev       # MySQL: connects to MySQL
  fink install postgresql80 postgresql80-dev  # PgSQL: connects to Postgresql
  fink install gd2                            # GD: used for image manipulation

Download and extract the PHP5 source. Start Terminal and switch to the php5 source directory.

  ./configure --with-apxs --with-config-file-path=/etc --sysconfdir=/private/etc
	--with-ldap=/usr --with-kerberos=/usr --enable-cli --with-zlib=/usr
	--enable-trans-sid --with-xml --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-mbstring
	--enable-mbregex --enable-dbx --enable-sockets --with-iodbc=/usr
	--with-curl=/usr --with-openssl=/usr  --enable-soap --with-xsl

Add these optional extensions if you installed the corresponding fink package.

  --with-mysqli=/sw/bin/mysql_config --with-mysql=/sw
  --with-pgsql=/sw
  --with-gd=/sw --with-jpeg --with-png --with-ttf --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6

After the configure is done run:

  make
  sudo make install

Enable mod_php5 in Apache: open /etc/httpd/httpd.conf in your text editor. Toward the very bottom of the file replace <IfModule mod_php4.c> with <IfModule mod_php5.c>

  sudo apachectl graceful

Verify setup:

  echo "<? phpinfo(); ?>"> /Library/WebServer/Documents/index.php
  open "http://localhost/"

Dashboard while cool, is not going to be a necessary part of life with OSX. It is still very easy to develop for, and many have created some great widgets. Some of these are useful, but will not change your life the same way Expose does.

Spotlight is a great search tool, but still too slow to be an application launcher like Quicksilver is.

Correction. CoreData is not the cause of the binary plist files. The binary plist format has been around since 10.2, but has not been the default until now. It is easy to convert files between formats using plutil.

Ultimately the best improvements are still under the hood IMHO. launchd is a great replacement for rc, SystemStarter, cron, inetd, etc. Hopefully in the near future more daemons/jobs will be migrated to this new system and leave the bloated crappy SystemStarter in the dust.

In fact I am writing this using a great dashboard widget called DashBlog. Dashboard is realy cool, and comes with some good widgets already, but since they can be written just using HTML/CSS/JS anyone can write their own. My favorite additions to the standard set of widgets are Dash Monitors and DashBlog. Dash Monitors is similar to gkrellm for Linux but not quite as configurable/extensible.

Spotlight has many great uses. Previously I used Quicksilver as a super fast app launcher. Spotlight might not be as fast as Quicksilver, but that is only because it searches through more than just apps. Spotlight is a good applauncher, but it really shines as a unified search. Can’t remember where you stored that old password for a website? Is it in your email, a text file, etc.? Simple solution… Spotlight.

Automator looks cool, but it kind of large and a bit unreasonable for single app scripting.

Core Data pissed me off a bit though. In Panther all preference files for all apps were simple text/xml files. That is very handy for app interoperability. However…Tiger now allows apps to store prefs in binary files. Erg! I was using a great script RandomTint.pl to randomize my Terminal background color, but it breaks now. The ‘defaults’ command still does work on these files well, but I am a bit disappointed.

On the Tiger Unix page they describe some interesting new stuff. ACL’s is quite exciting. Many unix commands now work with HFS+ files better than before. Launchd sounds cool, but it is an enormous break with UNIX tradition. I’ll have to learn more before I make a final decision. More and more great programming language and library support like sqlite, perl, php, python, ruby, etc.

Safari RSS sounds good for people who use RSS lightly or general beginners. I however am a NetNewsWire Lite user, and Safari doesn’t come close to it.

That is it for now. There are so many new features that I seem to find a new one all the time, some are small, other big. And many I haven’t yet had time to play with yet.

This article was quite surprising. It seems that I am split into two categories he mentions. I seem to fit the 40-something Unix hacker, even though I am not 40, but actually 26. Maybe this has to do with my early indoctrination into the computer world at age 12, followed by extreme enthusiasm, desperate learning, and hacking.

But, then I also fit in with the free-software political zealot crowd. This makes me quite a guilt ridden OS X user. I love using Unix based systems, especially Free ones (with a Capital F) like Darwin. But I hate non-free, encumbered, closed systems. OS X is a mix of both. Honestly I bought the powerbook for the amazing hardware. Unfortunately I started to play with OS X. I generally liked it, but nothing extreme, that is… until… I found the Terminal. My inner Unix hacker rejoiced, and my eye-candy loving user was quite pleased with the GUI. And every moment spent with OS X made me grow more and more in love with it.

I guess I have to either ditch OS X, or get over my guilt.