It has all the main things you’d want from an app like this. You can view your existing posts and pages as well as view comments and if you have the stats plugin then you can even view some of them on there too.

In fact to test it out I’m using the app to write this post now. It seems to work well. It there are a couple of things to note.

• You’re not going to want to type long posts on your iPad because it’s just not great for that and could cause some serious RSI issues.
• The comments section will tell you which post a comment was made about but there’s no link to that post or page which I think is an obvious shortcoming as you might not remember the content to which the comment refers from just the title of the post.

Apart from that though then yeah this seems like quite a useful app to have.

//Headers Required for SSL in IE
header(”Cache-Control: cache, must-revalidate”);
header(”Pragma: public”);

?>

Normally I don’t bother with making sure my projects are Internet Explorer compliant but the Open Flash Charts are just so pretty, and it’s not that difficult to fix, I felt I had to make sure they displayed correctly.

Whilst annoying the errors aren’t fatal. My applications have worked for long enough without solving the problem but it IS annoying and finally today I decided to do something about it. I found the solution on this blog and Duck Ranger gives much more sensible reasons for fixing the problem.

The error is caused by a Gritter’s CSS file creating a GET request to solve an IE bug but the request is for the current (CSS) directory which is forbidden.

.gritter-item-wrapper {
position:relative;
margin:0 0 10px 0;
background:url(’.'); /* ie7/8 fix */
}

Fortunately all I had to do as described in the previously mentioned blog is upload a real file. I opted for a 1 pixel transparent png.

.gritter-item-wrapper {
position:relative;
margin:0 0 10px 0;
background:url(’../images/blank.png’); /* ie7/8 fix */
}

There we go… annoying error gone

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now all is well in the world of DNS.

Last night I enabled PHP on the apache server built into Mac OSX on my new laptop and installed MySQL on it. I also set up some bash aliases to rsync commands so that I could synchronise the websites from the server to the laptop and back again.

Now that I had local copies of the sites that are synchronised it was time to turn my attention to synchronising the databases between the server and my local machine. I could of configured the server’s MySQL installation to allow remote connections, however, I did not want to do this for security reasons. I decided that I would connect to the MySQL server over SSH by forwarding a port on my local machine to a remote port on the server.

First I needed to create an SSH tunnel using the following command

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 server.host.name

The options for SSH are

• f
  • Requests SSH to background so that you do not have to keep a terminal connected to the server open
• N
  • Does not execute a remote command (useful for just forwarding ports)
• g
  • Allows remote hosts to connect to local forwarded ports
• L
  • Specifies that a local port (3307) is forwarded to the given host (server.host.name) and port (3306)

I created an alias to that command for easy use in future but I’ll need to make sure the tunnel is active before trying to connect to the remote server.

Next its time to turn our attention to actually connecting to the remote MySQL server.

mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307 -u username -p

The Options:

• h specifies the host to connect to (must be 127.0.0.1)
• P specifies the port to connect to (your locally forwarded port)
• u specifies the username to connect with
• p will prompt you for your password (–password=passtext can be used to give the password)

Thats if I wanted to connect to the remote MySQL server on the command line. The latest phpmyadmin has an option for syncronizing databases in which case you can put the above details and it will compare the databases and allow you to choose what to synchronise.

The appropriate setting can be found under:

System Preferences : Personal > Security > Firewall

I have mine configured to “Set access for specific services and applications” which normally asks me if I want to allow an application to accept incoming connections the first time I run it and that’s normally the end of it. The trouble comes when you try and update certain applications using Software Update. I’m not exactly sure what causes the problem but for some reason with specific applications the firewall then proceeds to ask you, each time, if you would like it to accept incoming network connections. This you can imagine is superlatively tedious.

The answer though is to just delete the application from you applications folder and reinstall it. The first time you open the freshly installed application it will ask the question and then bug you no more. Then all you have to worry about is not updating it via software update again.

telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 110 (xxx = mailserver)
+OK Hello there.
user USERNAME
+OK Password required.
pass PASSWORD
+OK logged in.
stat
+OK (Information about your mail)
quit
+OK Bye-bye.

To Test IMAP

telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 143
* OK (welcome message)
a login USERNAME PASSWORD
a OK login Ok.
a examine inbox
(Information about mail)
a logout
a OK LOGOUT completed

To Test POP3 over SSL

openssl s_client -connect xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:995
Commands as above

To Test IMAP over SSL

openssl s_client -connect xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:993
Commands as above

The way I did it was to have various directories in the /Users/username/Sites directory as is the normal set up but to have a symbolic link for each project that I wanted to have a better looking URL for so for example if my PHP My Admin was contained in the directory /Users/username/Sites/phpma then I would create a symbolic link to the directory /Library/WebServer/Documents/ using the command…

• ln -s /Users/username/Sites/phpma /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpma

Et Voila… I can now use and bookmark a shorter and less visually offensive URL to the sites I’m working on.

I’ve been meaning to try Joomla for some time and a friend mentioning it last night was the impetus for me to give it a go. I downloaded the latest stable version just now and decided to give it a go.

I was very impressed by the installation script and how it guides you through the installation process with handy guidance, however, I feel it falls down in one area.

On the penultimate installation screen there is an option to load default content into the database or previously saved data. This didn’t work for me and when I tried to go to the final screen of the installation I was greeted with the following errors…

Notice: Undefined index: DBtype in /var/www/xxx/htdocs/joomla_directory/installer/models/model.php on line 702

Fatal error: Call to undefined method JException::getNullDate() in/var/www/xxx/htdocs/joomla_directory/installer/helper.php on line 290

It took a bit of searching to figure it out but the problem lied with where joomla stores its configuration variables. At the second step of the installation there is a list of requirements one of which is write access to a file called ‘configuration.php’ in Joomla’s root directory. I noticed there’s a sample configuration file called ‘configuration.php-dist‘ so I copied it and gave the webserver write access to the file and the installer’s check seemed happy with this.

It turns out that the webserver either needs write access to the folder to write its own configuration file or if you provided the file with write access then it must be blank. I used touch to create the file and made it writeable by the webserver and the installation finally worked.

To set up a tunneled connection you issue the following command on any client:

ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 myuser@remotehost.com

The first command tells ssh to log in to remotehost.com as myuser, go into the background (-f) and not execute any remote command (-N), and set up port-forwarding (-L localport:localhost:remoteport ). In this case, we forward port 3307 on localhost to port 3306 on remotehost.com.