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:
Continue reading
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:
We’re taught to think of wealth in absolute terms. But doing so prevents us from understanding the relative difference in the costs of living between ourselves and the fantastically over compensated.
Instead, we’ve got to think of wealth in relative terms.
You know what stuff costs you relative to your salary. What you don’t know is what stuff would cost you if you earned double (half), triple (1/3), ten times (10%), one hundred times (1%) your current salary.
So, I did the math for you.
If you earn $50,000 a year, gas costs you $4 a gallon. If you earn $5 million a year, gas costs just 4 cents a gallon. Relatively speaking, why would the rich care if it goes up a dollar a gallon. To the wealthy, that’s only a penny more.
That Harley you want? $20k. A $5M man pays just $200.
That $400,000 dream house you’re looking at? Super affordable at $40,000.
Why’d I pick $5M to compare? Because the CEOs of 171 publicly traded companies all earn at least $5M a year in 2010.
The best-compensated CEO earned $84.5M. Relative to someone earning $50,000 a year, he pays 2/10ths of one cent per gallon of gas. This guy will only start to feel your pain when gas reaches $2000/gallon! But of course, he’s an insider sitting on boards of directors and leveraging his obscene salary to build more, so his wealth has ballooned beyond imagination long before that’s happened. Meanwhile, you’re still waiting on that cost of living adjustment that adds $85/month to your takehome.
PS. You’re what we refer to as the middle class.
Mac OS X 10.6 snow leopard uses the bash shell by default. If you install MySQL from the disk image (dmg) from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/, you can make it easy to access the mysql binary from the command line by adding it to your bash path.
Here’s how:
Open terminal, and type:
echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
This adds the default location of the MySQL binary to your shell environment.
Then, you need to force the system to reload your .bash_profile file. Again, from terminal, enter:
. ~/.bash_profile
You can check your environment variables by typing in terminal:
env
Now, to access MySQL from the command line, you only need enter:
mysql
You can easily install the mcrypt extension to PHP5 on Mac OS X Server. Here’s how: