By Richard Sheppard, 27 December, 2010

Just prior to Christmas, I received my new Sony Vaio. I messed about with the Windows 7 installation and borked it when trying to add Maverick to it. I then ran Maverick on it's own for a bit and then decided it might be useful to fix the dual boot thing working again. Second time lucky.

A few niggling bits and pieces were overcome, such as getting the trackpad to function. While looking through the syslog, I spotted this message:

intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: MCP power or thermal limit exceeded

By Richard Sheppard, 20 February, 2007

Acrobat Reader enable/disable plugins via the Get Info dialogNote: this issue disappeared for the author, after upgrading to Adobe Reader 8.1.

I was being driven around the bend trying to resolve a problem with Acrobat Reader 8 in that it kept crashing within 15 seconds of launching (scroll down to read more).

Eventually, in the Adobe forums, I found that others were having the same problem and it was due to the update plug-in. Most likely some sort of privileges problem, according to another poster in the forum.

The solution given by people in the forum was to choose to remove the Update plug-in by removing it from the application's package. However, I found that there was an extra pane in the Get Info dialog that allows you to add, remove, enable or disable plug-ins. I think it's a more sophisticated way to deal with it.

By Richard Sheppard, 1 August, 2006

To recap on the issue I had in my presentation re: "How to turn your Mac into a database-driven web server"

http://www.siliconmeadow.net/mac-as-web-server

at the June meeting, I had got to the stage of installing mySQL and configuring it via the terminal, but I could get no PHP scripts to access the database do to a conflict with "old" password hashing and the "new-style" 4.1.x passwords that mySQL uses.

By Richard Sheppard, 18 July, 2006

I have recently working with some new tools to work with Google's services, which ultimately should bring more traffic to my site and also earn me loads of money. Ideally, both simultaneously.

First, Google Adsense. I mentioned that I sussed it last week, for the most part, but also that I live in fear that ads that compete with my own site would appear on my site. For example, when I talk in a blog posting (like what you're reading now) or when I talk of web hosting or web design and build, will competitors' ads appear? Look around this page. You might see ads about free blogs, free web hosting or free web design and build. Great. I'm sure it's excellent value, but you know I'm better than all of them. I simply am not stupid enough nor rich enough to buy my own Adwords.

So, how much have I lost in this process? It's hard to tell specifically, but maybe not too hard. So far, one person out of the 120-180 visitors that appear each day over the past week has clicked on a Google ad. I really hope it wasn't for hosting or blogging or something like that, and that the person didn't subsequently find that they could get for free the services that I normally charge several tens of thousand of your earth pounds for.

The benefit that I've gained by the one click by the way, is about 47p or so. Don't tell the taxman.

Secondly, Google Sitemaps. Google has this great new way of getting you to supply them with pointers about what you'd like them to index on your site with some indication from you about how often the content changes. It's one of those win-win situations where the effort you make to help Google's bots to crawl your site, should help ensure you get listed in their pages appropriately. From Google:

By Richard Sheppard, 19 June, 2006

Prerequisites

In preparation for this presentation, I've done a fresh install of Mac OS X Tiger on an external drive and patched it up to the latest version. I've also installed a few programs that I use in web development and server configuration, including (but not limited to):

Can it get easier than this?

The quickest way to enable the web server on your Mac is by going to System Preferences>Sharing, and then ticking the Personal Web Sharing tick box, as shown below:

Sharing Prefs Pane

Note that this will allow you to access your server via these urls:

By Richard Sheppard, 16 June, 2005

At the end of last month, I purchased a the Mega Bundle Editor PHP set of Dreamweaver MX 2004 extensions from DMXZone.com - a site well known in the Dreamweaver extensions business. Two of my closest web dev colleagues swear by them for file uploading and general content management sections of web sites. Looking at my DMXZone account, I was reminded that I purchased the Pure PHP Image Bundle set of extensions in 2003. As a result, I was given a discount for the new set I purchased in May as it counted as an upgrade offer.

Yesterday, after demonstrating a page I had build with the Advanced HTML extension to AW, he pointed out that I had version 1 of the AdvHTML extension, that it was rubbish, and that I should have got version 2 instead - version 1 was soo old skool, that it should be considered "ye olde skoole". He even remembered a fact that I thought he would consider trivial - that version 1 didn't work with any Mac browsers!

So, I started looking into it in some detail, and it wasn't easy to understand the DMX Zone product range. To say, "it wasn't easy" is an understatement. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I purchased the PHP Mega Bundle version 1, which didn't have the AdvHTML extension. At first, I was indignant and considered writing a stiff letter. A letter so stiff, in fact, that it would need to be written on cardboard. Not only that, I was also going to send it.

Instead, I decided to fork out the extra £55 or so, as in the end, the only extension that was different in the new and improved Mega Bundle Editor PHP 2 was the AdvHTML extension, and considering the previous upgrade, I've still paid less than had I bought the new stuff altogether.