Right Click, Open With… has lots of duplicates!
Every once in awhile, Mac OS X seems to lose it’s way with regard to the apps it shows when you right click on a file, and choose “Open With.” For some reason, this is particularly pronounced in Mountain Lion (Apple’s buggiest OS to date).
Here’s how to fix the problem:
I recently worked on a project where we dynamically displayed page content with a single PHP script. But we didn’t want to display the PHP script name, variables and their values in the URL.
Hold down any key and you’ll get the special characters mapped to it. For example, if you’re writing “señor,” simply press and hold the “n” key longer than normal and you’ll get a popup menu with choices. An example of OS X taking a page out of the iOS usability guide.
Apple should build a wifi router into AppleTV, so that I can take this immensely portable device with me to meetings, presentations, and lectures. There, I could plug in and directly connect with my iPad or iPhone and use AirPlay.
Apple’s new iOS 5 includes a feature that allows text messages to be delivered directly to iOS devices, bypassing your carrier’s cellular network completely. It’s nice, insofar as it includes delivery confirmation messages. So, iPhones know when a message is being sent to another iPhone, and automatically uses this new service called iMessage.
The downside is that if you connect automatically to a wi-fi network that has blocked ports, you’ll find that iMessage text messages aren’t delivered. They often just pause midway through sending.
Also, you may find that other push notifications for other apps (like Facebook, Calendar, etc.) don’t get pushed to iPhones.
Not to worry, it’s an easy fix (so long as your network administrator is amenable to fully supporting iOS features like this!).
iMessage and push notifications works over the APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) channel. That is TCP Port 5223 outbound to 17.0.0.0/8 (Apple). Your admin will know what to do with this information!
I recently needed to change the permissions of all files inside a directory (only files but not folders), including subdirectories. From the command line in Mac OS X, I ran this command with success which changed all files recursively to 666 (rw-rw-rw-):
sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 666 {} \;Likewise, to change only directories to 777 (rwxrwxrwx), I used:
sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
Apache runs very slowly in Mac OS X 10.7.1 Lion. I checked out the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file and noticed that Apple shipped Lion with every single module turned on, meaning Apache is chewing up a lot of memory and CPU cycles on modules that (typically) aren’t needed!
Here’s how to reclaim the speed of Snow Leopard in Mac OS X Lion’s Apache configuration:
First, make a backup of /etc/apache2/httpd.conf.
Next, edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf in your favorite editor.
Search for LoadModule.
Then, comment out the modules that you don’t need by adding a hash character (#) at the beginning of the line. Be judicious in what you turn off. For example, I turned off mod_userdir.so, which then caused Apache to fail on startup.
Running httpd -t from the terminal showed that Apple’s default httpd.conf file is using the mod_userdir.so module, so I left it on (since it presumably supports using home directories for serving Sites).
For me, the modules I turned off are:
#LoadModule authn_dbm_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_dbm.so
#LoadModule authn_anon_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_anon.so
#LoadModule authn_dbd_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_dbd.so
#LoadModule authn_default_module libexec/apache2/mod_authn_default.so
#LoadModule authz_groupfile_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_groupfile.so
#LoadModule authz_user_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_user.so
#LoadModule authz_dbm_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_dbm.so
#LoadModule authz_owner_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_owner.so
#LoadModule authz_default_module libexec/apache2/mod_authz_default.so
#LoadModule auth_basic_module libexec/apache2/mod_auth_basic.so
#LoadModule auth_digest_module libexec/apache2/mod_auth_digest.so
#LoadModule dbd_module libexec/apache2/mod_dbd.so
#LoadModule mime_magic_module libexec/apache2/mod_mime_magic.so
#LoadModule unique_id_module libexec/apache2/mod_unique_id.so
#LoadModule proxy_connect_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_connect.so
#LoadModule proxy_ftp_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_ftp.so
#LoadModule proxy_scgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_scgi.so
#LoadModule proxy_ajp_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy_ajp.so
#LoadModule dav_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav.so
#LoadModule dav_fs_module libexec/apache2/mod_dav_fs.so
#LoadModule bonjour_module libexec/apache2/mod_bonjour.so
#LoadModule fastcgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_fastcgi.so
Good news out of Cupertino. Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion ships with a newer version of PHP (5.3.6), which has been compiled with GD, freetype, tidy (libtidy), and lots of other goodness.
Additionally, Apple has chosen to compile PHP with Suhosin Patch 0.9.10, which purports to substantially harden PHP. From the Suhosin web site: “It was designed to protect your servers on the one hand against a number of well known problems in PHP applications and on the other hand against potential unknown vulnerabilities within these applications or the PHP core itself.”
Apache on Mac OS X is configured with security in mind. Apple has chosen to ship it with a setting that causes the x-frame-options header to be sent, which has the effect of causing content hosted on a Mac OS X server to not show up inside and iframe on another site.
Well-written web apps (like WordPress) already send the x-frame-options header. My personal preference is to turn this off globally and then ensure that my web apps send it as needed.
Here’s how to disable it:
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You can easily install the PHP SSH2 extension to PHP5 on Mac OS X Server to support the new CDN features of SocialEngine 4.1.6. Here’s how: