Webonaut

I'm struck by a couple of anachronisms of late # 1: Power sucking backlit screens. How long will it be before I can read my iPhone screen in direct sunlight because it uses persistent pixels - offering way longer battery life, comfortable viewing for a long while, and makes it into a proper print/novel/newspaper alternative?

Upon restarting from the lastest couple of automatic Leopard updates from Apple PHP could no longer connect to MySQL, giving the error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) What this means is it can't find mysql.sock OR it's not finding the database ip you specified in your connection code. So, try this first: - replace "localhost" with "127.0.0.1" in your PHP If that doesn't work, you probably need to create a virtual linked file from /var/mysql/mysql.sock to /private/tmp/mysql.sock (where you are bound to have one): 1. Fire up the Terminal application 2. Type: cd /var ls 3. If you DO NOT have a mysql directory already in here type: sudo mkdir mysql 4. Do the important bit: cd mysql sudo ln -s /private/tmp/mysql.sock mysql.sock 5. If you get a mysql_connect Access denied for user type error subsequently, try: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name TO user@host IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; FLUS...

Say for example I want to use an expensive product - like something from Adobe's CS4 - but I only need to use it a couple of times a year because I'm not a designer. My options are: - Fork out the £2.5k required to buy the product - Get a pirate copy from thepiratebay.org for nothing and infect my PC/Mac with some hideous virus AND have to deal with carting my guilt around in a wheelbarrow (ok, handbag then) - Cry Not a fabulous choice. I also have a 512k broadband connection - so a clever web-based cloud version of the software (which doesn't even exist yet) isn't going to cut it for me. So how about: - Download full software as free trial which lasts 30 days - After which time you enter your paypal/credit card details and pay for each 8 hour chunk of usage - say £10 - Once you've paid up to the full amount of the product, it's yours and your license goes full. This as a licensing model would help cut piracy, work for casual users, still work for heavy users, w...

Social Networks are in their phase 1, where all the people are on the same site but that's not how the future will be. Many friends I have in the alternative community for instance do not feel at home on Facebook or myspace... indeed the bland middle-classness of Facebook turns me off. Humans are tribal animals everywhere but the web, and I believe this is purely because the idea of social networking online is still in it's infancy. The drive for change will come from several directions: Cool kids will soon want something more exclusive than Facebook or myspace, or wherever the adults and other uncool people hang out. Possibly even a closed, invite only type space? Similarly, those from other communities will forge their own dedicated sites - religious groups, alternative living groups, basically all those who separate themselves in the real world. They don't want to throw sheep, or poke - they want to share verse, or crochet patterns, or tyre recommendations - you get th...

GUIDE TO COMPILING A USEFUL DEVELOPMENT VERSION PHP FOR LEOPARD - INCLUDING GD GRAPHICS AND ZIP SUPPORT After some substantial frustration, I have compiled (mainly for myself) a guide to improving on the default PHP installation that comes with Leopard. If you've landed here from Google you've no doubt already found that the standard Leopard PHP is basic, lacking some (IMHO) essential features such as GD for generating graphics and Zip support. You'll have also cursed that there is no readily available PHP package to update with, so re-compiling yourself is the only way. // NOTE: Dec 09 - This ONLY WORKS FOR LEOPARD, NOT SNOW LEOPARD. SEE MORE RECENT POST FOR HOW I SOLVED THIS ON MY NEW MACBOOK PRO This propect needn't be too daunting though - with this handy guide! # Note: All commands below are meant to be run in Terminal BEFORE YOU START # You'll need some (free) software: - TextWrangler - XCode OSX Developer Tools (to give you a working C compiler - alternativ...