Starting MySQL on Leopard

For many, many months I have been seeking a website called "Angry Fly" and in particular the Fix for MySQL on Leopard page. It offered a quick and easy way for me to get MySQL started up on my Mac OS X 10.5 aka Leopard MacBook Pro. Worked ok on Tiger, but Leopard seems to be a bit more fussy.

I have just noticed a new comment today by Chris St.Germain.

"a new preference pane has been released from mySQL that actually works now! The file is: ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/MySQL.prefPane-leopardfix.zip "

This has made my day, a working MySQL preference pane in system preferences! Whoppee!

Leopard on Rails

So, Apple Mac OS X Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby on Rails. I am currently running 10.5.1, but till now haven't even played with RoR on the spotty cat, till now...

Found a great post, Ruby on Rails on Leopard: A N00b's view. This was just what the doctor ordered. I hadn't installed the X Code tools, so did that and pretty much followed Jeremy's example.

I did get one problem, when running the sudo gem update --include-dependencies, I got an error message: ERROR: While executing gem … (OpenURI::HTTPError). Googled it, and found this post, which suggested trying the command again, which I did.

Like Jeremy I navigated to an old Ruby project directory, typed: "script/server start" and then pointed my browser to 0.0.0.0:3000 and got the default "Welcome on board" welcome. Great stuff, now for MySQL...

XRAY cross browser web inspector

The Firefox Web Developer extension is a must-have extension for any web developer. Yet, this developer is a bit of a Safari freak. Till a couple of minutes ago, I was torn between both browsers. Safari is not perfect, but I prefer it to Firefox and with the addition of the Free, XRAY bookmark applet I am extremely happy. Sure I still need Firefox, just for checking web browser issues, but Safari does pretty much everything I want now.

Thanks, once again, to Mr Zeldman, for the heads up!

TextMate shortcuts for noobies

I have been using TextMate as my text/html/rails editing for a week or two now. It has largely replaced BBEdit, and for the most part I am extremely happy that I switched. I have been struggling with a few aspects of TextMate though. For example, if I used the bundle to insert a <br /> tag. (Keyboard Shortcut: ctrl + return), I got a <br> tag, not ideal when working on an xhtml file.

Setting up TextMate

This is easily fixed though thanks to Soryu's excellent TextMate Setup Tutorial

" The most important one for anyone who uses HTML will be TM_XHTML. Setting it to / will make all the HTML Bundle Snippets insert correct XHTML by closing single tags like <hr /> and <img /> "

TextMate Basics

Soryu has also written a TextMate Basics Tutorial, which is just the ticket for TextMate noobs like my self.

Cheating with TextMate

G Design's TextMate Cheat Sheet is a welcome addition to any TextMate users interior decor, or if like me your wife feels that pasting key commands on your walls spoils the interior design. Then why not put this Cheatsheet on your desktop instead.