Urban Puddle

I really enjoy free software. I love benefiting from it and I sleep easier knowing that no person or company is going to screw me out of money for an 'upgrade' or take away features under the same guise. Still, programmers have to make a living and the maintenance model of giving away the software and charging for support leaves me wondering what happens to a company/individual when too many people opt for the free option over the other. As a developer I cringe at the thought that my livelihood is dependent on donations or people clicking ads. It makes me wonder: can we charge for applications anymore in a world of free software?

I love free software. But, there is something to be said for paid support. When it comes to email, sometimes a robust mail server is just what the doctor ordered. Communigate Pro has been doing the job for large scale ISPs for a while now so back when one of my clients needed a solution I didn't hesitate to recommend it. I've no regrets except for one: the initial install was on a CentOS machine. Nothing against CentOS or Red Hat, but I prefer Debian based distros. And while the CG Pro mail server install instructions exist for Windows, MacOS X, FreeBSD, and many Linux distros, Ubuntu is currently not one of them. Fortunately it turns out it's not that bad to get it going. Here's what you need to do.

For the second time in as many months, I've put my Dell XPS 1330 in a non-usuable condition. The first time it happened, it was due to the power connector coming loose from the MLB (main logic board or motherboard). At first I'd have to wiggle my AC adapter to get a charge, but eventually my laptop refused to accept any juice at all and I was faced with the dreaded 2 hours of battery life. (on a side note, I'm glad everything is backed up w/ rsync!)

A few days ago, after a late night coding on the couch, I got up and accidentally snagged the cord which brought the laptop crashing down about 2 feet from the coffee table to the floor. This time the screen and AC are toast again.

If you upgraded from Tiger to Apple's OS X 10.5 Leopard you may find a few things that were OS related stopped working. In my case, PHP5 no longer responded as expected. Sure enough, some digging found it was disabled. Fortunately, it's pretty simple to get running again in Leopard.

Open up a terminal and type:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf +114

After typing in your password you'll find yourself on the exact line related to PHP5 that you need to uncomment. Remove the # at the start of the line so it looks like this:

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Then head over to your System preferences and stop/start your web server in the Sharing pane by unchecking and re-checking the box that says Web Sharing. That'll restart Apache2 for you -- this time with PHP5 enabled.

I don't like to use this blog to toot my own horn, but I'm pretty proud that the technology* project I led** back in 1999 while at Apple (Airport) was just rated at #13 in the Top 100 Tech Innovations of all time. If I had a tenth of a penny for every 802.11b station out there.. well, I'd be paying somebody to type this for me. :op

Of course, ahead of 802.11b is ahead of a bunch of really cool techs and a few questionable ones so I'm not sure how much stock I hold in the actual Top 100. Still, it was fun to see!

Yay, I've got Leopard! Boo, it won't let me choose a destination disk for the install on my shiny MacBook Pro. Being a former Apple employee I hesitate to sing their praises or fault them too loudly but I gotta say that this was pretty lame QA even for a company distracted by shipping iPhones and whatnot. There are a few solutions listed on the net from waiting to clicking invisible panes, to firing up Disk Utility or running commands via Terminal. If you're having trouble, here's a thread to check out. Sad sad sad that it has to come to this on a GM piece of software. I guess I was lucky that my solution just involved waiting while others I know ended up wiping out their hard disks completely. Did your installation go smoother?

This is a great tip for anyone using subversion and developing a rails app on Mac OSX. Thanks Courtenay!

Allow me to make a bold prediction. Yahoo! will suffer the same fate as Palm Inc. by becoming irrelevant in the next 2 years unless Jerry Yang manages to steer the ship back on course. Why do I say that? What could those two companies possibly have in common? I mean one is clearly an Internet superstar while the other makes crappy hardware.

If you're using OS X and need/want to use Firefox, do yourself a favor and go grab the optimized version compiled specifically for Mac OS X. It's much faster in almost all aspects (launch, rendering, etc) and you can even get it with Firefoxy form widgets. There's only one problem I've encountered so far while using Bon Echo and that's with the Pageflakes website. But, that too, can be fixed!

I've previously covered Visor for OS X as a Terminal supplement. It has the nasty habit of growing each time you launch Terminal and becomes ungainly after a while. I had written a bit about how to reset it but discovered a much easier method. Visit this tip on Mac OSX Hints for details!