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Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

Setup Symfony on Mac OS X (using MAMP)

May 10th, 2009

symfony
Symfony doesn’t play well with the default OS X server setup, so you will need an alternative setup. This tutorial assumes you are using MAMP but XAMPP is also an option.

This tutorial will get a server up and running that works with Symfony and allow you to access your projects from http://ProjectName.localhost/
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Computers, Guides, Programming , , , , , , ,

Symfony + Mac OS X + pdo_mysql.so

April 27th, 2009
UPDATE!
May 10th, 2009 – This tutorial is not complete. Following these instructions will only get command line version of PDO_MYSQL working. I have written a new guide that avoids the built-in versions of PHP and Apache. Read the updated tutorial »

I recently started working my way into the world of the PHP framework Symfony. While following the superb Jobeet tutorial, I encountered an error involving PDO_MYSQL and Mac OS X. I spent an hour trying to trace down the problem and another hour finding a solution. And as always, when something takes me too long to solve, I write a guide for it!
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Computers, Guides, Programming , , , , , ,

Easy Website on Your University of Oregon Web Space

February 1st, 2009

Wordpress on Your University of Oregon Web Space

NOTE: shell.uoregon.edu is now sftp.uoregon.edu

Ever wanted to have your own webpage at http://uoregon.edu/~YourDuckID? Ever wanted to setup a clean-looking, easy-to-maintain website for a student group your are associated with? Well now the whole process is a snap! Every University of Oregon student is given space to set up their own website.

It’s a fairly complex process to set up all the necessary tools (PHP and MySQL) manually, so I wrote a program to do it for you (mostly) automatically! All you need to do is login to your uoregon.edu account and follow a couple simple instructions.

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College, Computers, Guides, Programming, Wordpress , , , , , ,

Creating a MediaWiki API Instance Outside Installation Directory

January 11th, 2009

I’m in the process of writing mediawiki2wordpress—a plugin to allow WordPress to access and display content from a MediaWiki installation. I spent a bit of the evening figuring out how to get MediaWiki to let me trick it into thinking I was making a standard request.

The method I explain here gives you access to the MediaWiki API class as opposed to the standard MediaWiki rendering class. Most of this code came from MediaWiki’s api.php which you can find in MediaWiki 1.13.

Here’s what the API output will look like for the Foobar page on Wikipedia (in XML).

I spent quite a bit of time poking around in the MediaWiki /includes directory and trying different hack-ish methods before this page that had exactly what I needed! It did need updating, but I was happy to oblige. I even had this whole post written up using a sloppier approach before finding the FauxRequest class that I explain below.
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Featured, Guides, Photography, Programming, Wordpress , , , , ,

Quicksilver Trigger: “Show Current Track” in iTunes

January 8th, 2009

A while back I throw together this AppleScript to trigger Quicksilver to not only go to iTunes, but to automatically focus on the current track. (Note: When iTunes is already the front window, the command to do this is ⌘L.

Features

  • Brings iTunes to the front if it isn’t already the front window
  • Highlights the track that is currently playing (if one is playing)
  • If iTunes is already the front window, this script will hide the window (similar to using ⌘H

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Computers, Featured, Guides, Programming , , , ,

Setting Up Apache, MySQL and PHP on OS X Leopard

January 3rd, 2009

mampI recently had to setup MySQL on Mac OS X Leopard (I was using 10.5.6). I can never find a guide that gets Apache, MySQL and PHP working using the binaries that come packaged with Leopard. I also don’t like using pre-packaged installers like XAMPP and MAMP. This guide is intended for advanced users as very little explanation is given for each step.

Please add a comment if you have any suggestions for improvement.

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Computers, Featured, Guides , , , , , ,

Hackintosh 2.0

December 23rd, 2008

apple-logoAfter spilling water through the fan vents of my desktop on my current hackintosh, I had to make a new one. All that needed replacing was the motherboard. I wanted to pick a board that had been put through it’s paces in the OSx86 (hackintosh) community. There was an amazing guide for the first board I picked, but it wasn’t being sold on Newegg.com anymore, so I decided on the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P.

You can find more information about my setup on my hackintosh v2 wiki page. If you want to see every step I went through to get this system working, check out that page.

What To Expect

This guide will let you install OS X Leopard 10.5.6 from the retail disk (straight from Apple!). You’ll have a system with full functionality and minimal hacking.

I have not tested this setup extensively since I got it working, so I make no guaranty about it’s stability. The way I went about it isn’t the cleanest, but it works. I’m hoping weaksauce12 will release a Universal OSx86 Installer plug-in for this board in the near future. Keep an eye out on my blog for another post involving that installation.
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Computers, Guides , , ,

Google Hack: Accessing more than 1,000 results

August 21st, 2007

Google H4x0r
I’ve been doing a lot of work with complex search queries on Google lately. I have a script that grabs all the URLs returned for a given query. The problem is that although there are hundreds of thousands of results for most queries, Google will give you this notice if you try to get more than the first 1,000 results: “Sorry, Google does not serve more than 1000 results for any query.”

This restriction became a problem for me. After doing some research, I ran across an interesting workaround that allows you to access twice as many results. Simply include and remove a common word in your queries. For example, if you are searching for proxy and want to get 2,000 results, use these two queries:

Now you have 2,000 unique results.

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Programming ,

The Nerd Community

July 12th, 2007

Nerdiness

I have been a nerd my entire life. I started designing websites in grade school and I have only been sucked further and further down the rabbit hole since. I have been part of the online nerdy community for quite a while, but it’s not too often that I get to interact with my geeky brethren in person. This past weekend was my first excursion into that community and I must say that I had a blast.

My boss, Jon Steinhart, has a party at his house every summer and invites all of his friends, coworkers, etc. Little did I know, Jon has built up quite a list of contacts in the tech world in his time.

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Computers, Life, Programming

Uploading Photos within Facebook Apps

May 30th, 2007

Facebook Platform LogoFacebook recently released the Facebook Platform which allows developers to write applications and tools that run inside users’ profiles and within Facebook itself. So far, the Platform has been a huge success. Dozens of useful applications are coming out every day and most users are very excited for the extra functionality.

I am in the process of writing an application that brings together Flickr sets and Facebook photo albums. Unfortunately, the current implementation of the Facebook Platform lacks the ability to easily upload photos to a user’s account.

To remedy this situation, Paul Wells and I decided to writing our own addition to the Facebook PHP5 Client Library. Using it is as simple as uploading the file to your server and changing two lines of code in your existing applications. The best part is that our class does not involve code hacks at all. Our classes simply extend the current ones and add the functionality we want. The advantage to this approach is that the code will still work if Facebook updates the API.

To download the code and see an example of it’s use, visit the project page.

Computers, Programming