Tina Dico - Home (Acoustic)

March 11th, 2008 | Song Of The Week | No Comments »

Damn I forgot to post a song of the week last week. So I’ll do one today and another on Friday. Anyway, I love Zero7, I discovered Tina Dico from listening to them. The original track ‘Home’ can be found the Zero7 album When it Falls. This acoustic version is pure class. Also I want that guitar, my father has a 12string that looks and sounds just like it, but it has seen better days.


Live from CreativeCamp in Kilkenny

March 8th, 2008 | General | No Comments »

Blogging from an iPod touch today.

Arrived this morning around 9.15. I have to say I’m very impressed with the venue.

10.30
Caught an interesting talk from Cathy Fitzgerald about building an online arts community with the help of several local authorities in the south east. The site is artlinks.ie for those interested. All creatives are encouraged to join the community which is currently 650 strong.

Break for fresh air now. More to come. (more…)


Installing MySQL and Apache on OSX 10.5 Leopard

March 6th, 2008 | Reference, Software | No Comments »

Up to now I’ve used MAMP to get MySQL and Apache up and running quickly on my mac. I prefer to get under the hood as such when I have the time and set these things up individually. In this post I’ll go through simply installing the MySQL5 package and then build and install Apache2. (more…)


More Adobe CS3 Install trouble on OSX

March 5th, 2008 | Software | 1 Comment »

I’ve already blogged about Adobe’s ridiculous issue with case sensitive file systems. That gave me enough hassle on my own machine at home.

I finally got my iMac at work today. Gorgeous machine. Clean Leopard install, banged in the CS3 suite install disk and left it off to install while I went on lunch as the installer is notoriously slow. Came back from my lunch, the install was successful except for the small fact that it failed to install Photoshop and In-Design.

No indication was give as to what the problem was. Adobe’s install logs weren’t exactly informative either.
So I ran the installer again, this time just selecting the apps that failed to install. Waited 40mins to be told that the install failed again.

Finally I came across Adobe CS3 Clean, a script that Adobe have published that clears out any files that may be interfering with the install. This mainly deals with issues caused by having older Adobe suite apps or the CS3 beta suite hanging around but I figured what the hell.

I followed the instructions provided. Removed the entire suite. Ran the script using the more aggressive Level 2 option. And then reinstalled. Note that I also chose not to install Version Cue Server this time round, that may also have had an effect. After an hour or so the installer completed, this time with green ticks all round.

Hurrah!


Problem Testing ActiveResource with Mocks in Rails

February 29th, 2008 | Design & Development | 5 Comments »

A note for those who are using ActiveResource.

I ran into a bit of a problem the other day, not with using the HttpMock class itself. Mocks work pretty well in ActiveResouce. The problem came about when I tried to not use HttpMock. I almost tore my hair out but eventually a simple solution came. Thanks to Jason for the shoulder surfing effect. (more…)


The Weepies - World Spins Madly On

February 28th, 2008 | Song Of The Week | No Comments »

Last.fm continues to help me discover music that I already own but haven’t given the deserved attention. This song was featured in two of my favourite shows, Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy, both shows exhibiting superb musical taste.

The video is not an official video as far as I know but it should be. It’s brilliant.


Do you use an application launcher?

February 26th, 2008 | General | 5 Comments »

On my mac at home I’ve been using Quicksilver for some time now. I’ve got no complaints there.

At work, where unfortunately I’m stuck with a pc for the moment, I have been trying out application launchers for Windows.

After looking around a bit decided to give two a try, Enso and Launchy. I tried Launchy first. It was very simple, I bound it to CTRL + SPACE as that is my preference, using that keystroke, the launcher appears (which is nicely skinnable), you begin typing, it starts figuring out which app you want to launch. Very like Quicksilver. I can’t fault it.

Enso, to be fair is more than just an application launcher. You can do a lot more with Enso as is detailed on their demo. There is one big difference however and I found it to be a deal breaker for me. (more…)


Foy Vance - Gabriel and the Vagabond

February 22nd, 2008 | Song Of The Week | 1 Comment »

This came through on my Last.fm recommendations. Turns out I actually had it in my music collection on a Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack and didn’t know it. This track is pure gold. Enjoy.

I don’t know if anyone has noticed, I’m trying to be more active with my blog again. This marks the first of what I intend to be a regular Song of the Week post.


Mail.app with GMail IMAP very slow?

February 20th, 2008 | Software | 8 Comments »

For the last two days I watched as Leopard’s Mail.app tried to download 1 email at an average of 1kb per second.
My internet connection in general was fine yet it looked like it was going to take Mail the entire duration of Lent to download this email.

I figured I must have a setting wrong. I checked Google’s IMAP configuration instructions for Mail 3.x on Leopard. No Joy.
I tried using the information they provided for Mail 2.x setup. Those emails were still crawling down.

Finally I checked Google’s details for configuring other IMAP clients
It says you can use either port 465 or 587 for outgoing mail. I had been using 587, so I changed to port 465. Hey presto! Emails are now flying down. I don’t understand how a dodgy setup for outgoing mail could affect my incoming mail but I’m more than relieved to see Mail.app doing it’s thing now.


A sarcastic slow clap for Adobe CS3 developers please.

February 19th, 2008 | Design & Development, Technology | 3 Comments »

I’d like to thank Adobe CS3 developers for my source of utter frustration last night and this morning.

Last friday I did a clean install OSX 10.5.2 on my iMac. When presented with the choice of two filesystems, HFS+ Journaled, or HFS+ Journaled, Case-Sensitve. I chose the case-sensitive option because I am a web developer, I deal with linux OS’s all the time, I’m used to it. It makes sense. How was I supposed to know that 3 days later, when I begin to install Adobe CS3, the installer would drop out immediately with an error.

"the file system of the OS volume is not supported"

I found this on their support area : http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb400587&sliceId=2

What? Why? I’ll tell you why, because those CS3 developers are the laziest damn developers I’ve heard of. A problem like this is completely ridiculous. I can’t begin to comprehend how Adobe developers could blatently ignore some basic common sense coding practice and cause so much grief.

Adobe doesn’t care that they have caused this issue. They know about it alright, it hasn’t just surfaced with CS3 it’s been around for a while. I’ve read that CS2 would go through the install on case sensitive systems and then give problems when it couldn’t find files as you started apps in the suite. Well at least I might have had an opportunity to fix those issues if CS3 would go through the install. But no, this was their fix. Rather than just address their sloppy coding and fix the filenames referenced. The installer refuses to continue.

The only real solution seems to be reformat, don’t use case sensitivity next time.

Nice one Adobe. Stand up and take a bow.