I took the steps as I discribed them myself, but it seemed that TM was still trying to create a new sparsebundle instead of using the newly created on.

If you are using Snow Leopard, keep these things in mind:

• The naming of the sparsebundle file needs to be a tad diffrent. No more use of the MAC address in the filename. You can just use <computername>.sparsebundle
• One important step to follow is the fact that TimeMachine is now looking for a file called com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist
  . This file needs to reside inside the sparsebundle directory.
• So fire up terminal and go to /Volumes/<volumename>/<computername>.sparsebundle
• open up vi (name the file com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist and add the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>com.apple.backupd.HostUUID</key>
    <string>YOURUUIDHERE</string>
</dict>
</plist>

NOTE: Replace COMPUTER UID with the UUID of your MAC. You can find it under the System Profiles on the Hardware tab. Now fire up TimeMachine and everything should be running smooth again.

So here is some info how I got to enable some basic syntax highlighting in Terminal and VIM. Note that these settings are user specific and not system wide.

Fire up Terminal and create a .vimrc file in your home directory.

cd
vim .vimrc

Edit/create /usr/share/vim/vimrc for system wide settings.

Press the ‘i‘ key to switch vim to Insertion Mode, then enter these lines

set ai                  " auto indenting
set history=100         " keep 100 lines of history
set ruler               " show the cursor position
syntax on               " syntax highlighting
set hlsearch            " highlight the last searched term
filetype plugin on      " use the file type plugins

" When editing a file, always jump to the last cursor position
autocmd BufReadPost *
\ if ! exists("g:leave_my_cursor_position_alone") |
\ if line("'\"") > 0 && line ("'\"") <= line("$") |
\ exe "normal g'\"" |
\ endif |
\ endif

Press the Escape key to take vim out of Insertion Mode, then press ‘:‘ (colon) followed by ‘x‘ to save the file and exit. Now when you list a directory or edit a file through vi(m) you’ll see that all syntaxes are highlighted.

Long live VI(M)!!

First of all, note that we are going to install MySQL compiling from source. So make sure you have installed Xcode tools and you know your way around Terminal

Now lets set up our personal profile where we declare our path variable. Fire up Terminal and create/edit your profile file:

vi ~/.profile

Set your path variable like this:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

Close and save the file. Now load the the path variable to your current shell:

source ~/.profile

Now verify your updated path:

echo $PATH

You should see /usr/local/bin at the beginning of the line returned by the system.

Now lets download the MySQL source and start compiling like crazy :

curl -0 http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/mysql-5.1.41.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.easynet.be/
 
tar xzvf mysql-5.1.41.tar.gz
cd mysql-5.1.41
CC=gcc CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer" CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -O3 -fno-omit-frame-pointer -felide-constructors -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-extra-charsets=complex --enable-thread-safe-client --enable-local-infile --enable-shared --with-plugins=myisam,innobase --with-zlib-dir=bundled --with-big-tables --with-readline
 
make
sudo make install
 
cd /usr/local/mysql
sudo ./bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
sudo chown -R mysql ./var

Ok, everything should be compiled and installed without problems. Now lets create the launch daemon with the following content

sudo vi /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plits

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>KeepAlive</key>
 <true/>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>com.mysql.mysqld</string>
 <key>Program</key>
 <string>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe</string>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>UserName</key>
 <string>mysql</string>
 <key>WorkingDirectory</key>
 <string>/usr/local/mysql</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Change the user to root.

sudo chown root /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist

Now, to start / stop MySQL, run the these commands:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist
 
sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist

Now the last thing todo is to set the root password:

mysqladmin -u root password "mypassword"

Now MySQL should be running smoothly and without problems on Snow Leopard.

NOTE: For the RoR mysql gem, use the following command:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Just bought a network disk last week to backup some stuff on from my dads computer. But instead of buying a normal external USB drive, I decided to buy a network drive so I could use it myself.

After some research I choose for the Lacie Network Drive. It has a simple web interface for configuration purposes and it’s accessible through AFP, SMB and FTP.

For Windows/Linux users, SMB would be enough, but since I work on a Mac, I needed the AFP protocol.
Leopard is a great OS and it has many great features. One of it is Time Machine. Time machine takes hourly snapshots of your disk and lets you browse through your backup history to recover lost files.

By default, Time Machine only backups to external drives connected trough USB. But I found out it’s pritty easy to let it automatically backup to a network drive.

First, enable unsupported volumes in Time Machine. This can be done by opening Terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Now when you want to select a disk, your network drive should show up in the list. But that’s not all. For some reason, Time Machine is unable to create the initial sparcebundle. Well, it actualy starts creating it, but during the process, it just fails. So, we just create it ourselfs.
Go to Disk Utilities and click on “New Image” with the following settings:

1. Save As ComputerName_MACAddress (some say you can choose the name yourself, but I didn’t want to take any chanses.
2. Change partition to “No Partition Map”
3. Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
4. Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac. Sparce Bundle Disk Images grow in size dynamically.
5. Create it and move this file to your network drive.

Now, go to the Time Machine interface again and tell it to start backing up. Now Time Machine should start backup your stuff to your network drive. It should even do so every hour automatically. When you are on location, and Time Machine can’t access you drive, you won’t get any errors. It will just retry every hour.

You might find posts where people say that backing up on unsupported drives is a stupid idea and it is unreliable, but untill today, I haven’t found any problems. I even recovered a few files for testing and it worked perfectly. But even so, don’t shoot me if something goes wrong.

I just had one small problem when my router assigned a new IP to the network drive. Time Machine didn’t seem to find the drive anymore even when it was showing up in Finder. So I just fixed the problem by assigning the IP myself (not through DHCP anymore) and problem solved.

The stock MySQL and Apache are both 64bit, but the Ruby interpreter is 32 bit. That’s why you can’t use the 32 or 64 bit MySQL library gem. I found a lot of “idea’s” on the net, but none of them helped out, or I didn’t think they where good enough.

One of them was to run a second MySQL instance on 32bit. A lot of users solved  that way but I found it just stupid running 2 MySQL instances. So then it struck me, why not recompiling the stock MySQL as a universal build that supports both 32 and 64 bit?

So I did. I downloaded the source from the MySQL website and compiled it like this:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 \
CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' \
LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64' \
CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64' \
./configure \
'--disable-dependency-tracking' \
'--prefix=/usr/local/mysql' \
'--localstatedir=/usr/local/mysql/data' \
'--libexecdir=/usr/local/mysql/bin' \
'--with-comment=MySQL Community Server (GPL)' \
'--enable-thread-safe-client' \
'--enable-local-infile' \
'--enable-shared' \
'--with-zlib-dir=bundled' \
'--with-big-tables' \
--with-readline \
'--without-docs' \
'--with-plugins=myisam,innobase'

And my problem was solved. I had one MySQL instance running, and I finally could use RoR 2.2.

Now the only problem remaining is getting PHP to run properly.

Like most of you know, I’m in the web development business. So I need PHP and Ruby on Rails.

I was happy to notice that PHP en RoR where installed by default on Leopard. But then I needed MySQL PDO. Hmm, the default PHP installation doesn’t support MySQL PDO. So I need to recompile. So I downloaded the PHP source and tried to recompile it with almost the same parameters I found of my previous installation. But still no go. I just gave up at the moment.

Then next thing happend. RoR 2.2 came out. So I wanted to upgrade. I upgrade an old experimental app and tried to run it. Oops, looks like RoR doesn’t ship anymore with mysql library. After a quick google, I noticed I had to install the mysql 2.7 gem.

Ok, that’s easy. Tried to install it, but ran into errors. So after some more googling I saw that other mac users ran into the same problem and various solutions where found. But, none of them worked for me. Well, I didn’t tried them all. Some of the solutions mentioned installing both 64 and 32 bit version of MySQL. Well, I just like to run a clean system and not messing with diffrent installations.

I googled a lot lately but still didn’t found a solution for both of my problems. So if any of you readers might have found a solution to help me out, please do share.