The Wax Drum

When taking a site live onto a production server, it's always tempting to rush the last few steps, especially if you're under a launch deadline, or if you've been working on the same site so long that you're sick of it. At this point it's important to sit back, take a breath, and be sure to go through the following pre-flight checklist:

1. Check for broken links
2. Disable any debugging lines in your code
3. For PHP-based sites, set error_reporting to NONE. Errors should be redirected to a log file.

A Web Development Toolkit

Although I don't have it yet, apparently Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" comes with ROR. I'm still on "Tiger", so I had to install it manually. Fortunately, I found a great Tutorial at Dave Benjamin's Site.

I encountered a funky problem on this very site where certain characters in my news feeds were getting garbled in the database. I suspected it was a Unicode/UTF-8/etc problem, and upon exploration I discovered this suggestion. First backup the table(s) with the offending data:

$ mysqldump -uusername -ppassword --add-drop-table --default-character-set=latin1 database table > backup.sql

Then restore the table(s) with the following command:

mysql -uusername -ppassword --default-character-set=utf8 database < backup.sql

MD5 is an algorithm for generating a digital signature from a message of indeterminate length. It can be used as a form of encryption but is also useful for ensuring data has not been corrupted during transmission.

Under Mac OS X, the "md5sum" terminal command allows the generation and verification of md5 checksums. An md5 checksum file will typically have a ".md5" extension. To verify data integrity from an existing md5 file, issue the following terminal command:

$ md5sum -c 

Apache 2 offers many improvements over Version 1.3 that comes with Mac OS X 10.4. That's probably why it comes with Mac OS X 10.5! For those of you who are just hankering for Apache 2 but not quite ready for the move to Leopard, here's how it's done. Roll up your sleeves, boys & girls...

Disable Apache 1.3

The first thing you have to to is disable the Apache 1.3 web server. In the "System Preferences" app, go to "Sharing", and turn off "Personal Web Sharing".

Download & Install

I learned about Analog through a friend whose web site is hosted at Cornerhost. I loved the taglines after "You'll fine three things here:"

Cornerhost uses a GNU/GPL utility called "Analog", a well-designed and very customizeable utility which reads Apache's standard log file format, processes and formats the data into HTML code. Point your browser to the resulting output for an easy and clear method of analyzing your web server's access logs.

This was a "nice" add-on with PhotoShop 7 which became a true "feature" in PhotoShop CS with the ability to enlarge previews to a reasonable size without a loss in image quality (even without using "generate high-quality previews - see below).

So I'm flush in a world of cheap storage and my 80GB laptop drive makes me feel "crowded". But ok, I have my external drive (a HUGE plus for the recent global reinstall), DVD backups, and so on.

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I'll start...
Name: Charles
Occupation: Photographer

The one thing in my laptop bag (besides my laptop) I can't live without: My Sonos Digital Music System

Occasionally when I eject a CD or DVD using the normal Mac OS X methods (either pressing the "eject" button on the keyboard or dragging a volume to the trash", the volume disappears, but the disc doesn't come out. Every time this happens, I browse the usual troubleshooting sources (eg., macosxhints.com), and find the unhelpful procedure using the Terminal "hdiutil" utility. This only works if the volume is mounted.

This document is an excerpt from the Apple Knowledgebase