OS X backups with built in tools

February 11, 2004

MacDevCenter has an article on doing automated backups with existing tools. It is not the most efficient use of disk space, as it always does a full backup, but its a great place to start. Be sure to read the comments as a couple of errors in the script have been flushed out already.

Drupal Bookmarklet for Safari

February 9, 2004

I finally got around to putting together a Drupal bookmarklet for Safari. Replace www.example.com with your server and make sure the rest of the path is correct and it should work for you.

javascript:t=window.getSelection();void(window.open ('http://www.example.com/node/add/blog?edit[title]= '+escape(document.title)+'&edit[body]='+escape(t)+'', '_blank','width=710,height=500,status=yes,resizable=yes, scrollbars=yes'));

Drag this to your menu bar and edit the website and it should work.

MySQL Count() Problem on OS X

February 8, 2004

I've been running Drupal on OS X server and it works well. However I've had a problem that has been reported on the Drupal site as well.
SELECT mode, COUNT(*) FROM users GROUP BY mode; causes problems. The count returned is way out of bounds.
It returns a count of 864691128455135232. While a
SELECT COUNT(uid) FROM users ;
returns 12 - the correct number. The problem is that there are some places (in the import module for example) where there is a COUNT() instead of a COUNT(DISTINCT). For example in the import module the following change will resolve the issue. Change: Read more about MySQL Count() Problem on OS X

iFile

February 6, 2004

Last month Tidbits published an interview with Bruce Horn on the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. In the article Bruce talks about what he is doing today and discusses iFile. The article is important because it talks about transforming the way in which file systems store information. Not in the sense of how bytes are organized, although that is important as well, but in the sense of how users interact with the filesystem.

Things you shouldn't do

January 23, 2004

I had a call today from someone who had changed their home directory's name in OS X. This is a bad idea. The way permissions are set in OS X you can do this if you are an administrator. Users who have not been given administrator privileges lack the rights to make such a change. It reminds me that I saw a problem a short time ago where users can enter short user names that are longer than 8 characters. This causes problems for the unix underpinnings of the OS. These are things that should be fixed to prevent people having problems with their systems.

From what I've seen users should change the permissions on the /Users/ directory to prevent accidents. The command:

% sudo chmod g-w /Users/

will change it so that users with Admin privileges don't accidently change the name of their home directory. The % is not a part of the command but the end of the prompt where you type the command

Tunesatwork.com

January 15, 2004

From the website TunesAtWork looks to be a pretty good solution for sharing your iTunes library with yourself across the net.

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