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Whilst still a student I worked in a pharmacy in Bridgnorth one summer for eight weeks. I really enjoyed the placement and the people there, although, not always the work. The daily commute was a pain but the people made up for it. When I left we all went for a drink in one of the local pubs. One of the presents they bought for me was a mug with the town hall of Bridgnorth on. I’ve since been working in and around Tamworth. I took the mug with me as a reminder of the fond memories I had in Bridgnorth.

A couple of nights ago I found myself dreaming I was in a multi-storey car park with a now ex-boyfriend. For some reason I was desperate to get away from him and escape in my car but I couldn’t get to it and exclude him as we were both so near to it. I decided to run up a spiralling staircase. He chased me. Initially this was playful like previous mock fights we engaged in.

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Isn’t its simplicity beautiful.

Gritter is a really good extension of jQuery’s functionality that is used to display information boxes to users. If you use firefox’s extension Firebug though or you look in your server logs then you may see that it’s causing 404 errors.

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.

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While playing with my /etc/hosts file for testing a new server setup I needed to flush my DNS cache. As ever, terminal came to my aid.

dscacheutil -flushcache

Now all is well in the world of DNS.

The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about setting up a local copy of my websites on my laptop so that I can develop them before I make them live.

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 Read the rest of this entry »

If you have never set a root password for MySQL, the server does not require a password at all for connecting as root.

To setup root password for first time, use mysqladmin command at shell prompt as follows:

$ mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

However, if you want to change (or update) a root password, then you need to use following command

$ mysqladmin -u root -p’oldpassword’ password newpass

At the beginning of the week I purchased a new MacBook Pro In between working I’m in the process of configuring it as I like it and one of the things that was bugging me was the default shell for the root user. I was foolishly trying to set the the prompt PS1 value in .bash_profile when the default root shell isn’t even bash.

The solution is to switch to the superuser (root) and issue the following command…

chsh -s /bin/bash

That will change the default shell to bash and the prompt will change as per your configuration.
Just for information my root PS1 is…

PS1=’\[\033[01;31m\]\h\[\033[01;34m\] \W \$\[\033[00m\] ‘

Happy Configuring!

Recently I’ve had a bother with the Mac firewall asking me if I want it to accept incomming network connections every time I open a particular application.

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.

To Test POP3

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.

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Remember now as you pass by,

that as you are so once was I.

And as I am you too shall be,

prepare ye then to follow me.