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The first screenshots of Windows Vista are popping up on the internet. The remark of Steve Jobs (Redmond, start your photocopiers) has been proven right. Several features of Longh—, eh, Vista seems to be copied from Tiger.

But…A microsoft developer has the best excuse ever:

“If you are slow (or lazy) in your development, you never can be called a copycat”
Or, like he puts it:

Naturally, some Macintosh users will claim that this is like “Dashboard”. And indeed there are similarities here. But Microsoft has been working on Avalon a lot longer than Apple was working on Dashboard. And Avalon Express applications are designed to be very secure from day 1.

The quote above was taken from this website

A while ago I enabled a jail for an useraccount on my server.
Last week, I had to add another user.

The difference between priviliged useraccount and a “jailed” useraccount is a dot in the path of the home directory, for example: “/Users/./username”.

Being a little bit under stress and having not very much time, I couldn’t recall how to do that with OS X serveradmin.
Very frustrating. Googling and digging through the manuals didn’t give the answer where I was looking for.
Am I the only one who prefers the plain old /etc/passwd above netinfo?

But…today I recalled how I did it before.
And it’s so simple….(after mucking around with obscure CLI commands like nicl and serversetup)

Having an ADC-select account, I have access to the latest release builds of Tiger.
On Easter-Sunday, I decided to do something usefull with my tiger-seed and downloaded the Dashboard SDK.

Being used to PHP, it took some frustrating tries with javascript, but some hours later I was looking at my first widget.
It basically uses Curl to fetch PHP generated content over a HTTPS connection.
Shown are the last five lines of a access-log from a webapplication.
It works like a charm and refreshes every time dashboard shows up, or with the command+r keycombo.

If Tiger is released and the NDA is lifted, I’ll probably post the widget for download…untill then, some screenshots:

the front, some content blurred for privacy reasons

and the backside, i simply love the animation :)

With the latest discovery of some remote vulnerabilities in mysql and PHP, I had to upgrade my production server.
And to be clear, I don’t like updates.
Esp. not on mission critical apps. Updates tend to break things, you see:)

But running php 4.3.6 and mysql 4.0.20 was getting…unwise.

Upgrading PHP is easy, with the (imho) great installer of entropy.ch.

installer -verboseR -pkg ~/php-4.3.10.pkg -target /

Don’t forget afterwards to restore your httpd.conf and to edit /usr/local/php/httpd.conf.php to add:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps


MySQL is somewhat more tricky.
The version supplied by Apple is well…historic.
I like to compile MySQL from source (esp. because that takes 8,5 minute on my Xserve :) and install it to /usr/local/mysql-(version).
After that I create a symlink from /usr/local/mysql-(version) to /usr/local/mysql.
Take some care replacing the apple supplied mysql-binaries with symlinks to the up2date /usr/local/mysql/bin/ counterparts.
After this, upgrading mysql from source is painless.

The most recent upgrade:

# cd /usr/local/src
# gnutar -xzvf mysql-4.1.10a.tar.gz
# cd mysql-4.1.10a
# ./configure --with-openssl \
--prefix=/usr/local/mysql-4.1.10_a \
--localstatedir=/usr/local/mysql-4.1.10_a/data\
--mandir=/usr/local/share/man/\
--with-mysqld-user=mysql
# make
# make install
# cd /usr/local/
# mysqladmin -u root -p shutdown
# cp -R mysql/data mysql-4.1.10_a/data
# chown -r mysql:wheel mysql-4.1.10_a/data
# ln -s /usr/local/mysql-4.1.10_a /usr/local/mysql
# mysqld_safe &


That’s all. If something goes wrong, just restore the symlink to the “old” mysql-(version) and you’re safe.
Be aware of the new password hashing mysql uses from 4.1.1 of. I used the –old-password switch untill I’ve upgraded all my clients.

Quick and dirty:

download the .po file
edit in bbedit
save

get the gettext tools from:

http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/devtools/gettext-macosx.tar.gz


mkdir -p /usr/local/lib
cp gettext* /usr/local/lib/
ln -s /usr/local/lib/msgfmt /usr/sbin/msgfmt
/usr/local/lib/libintl.a

msgfmt --statistics -o nl_NL_merlijn.mo /Users/merlijn/Desktop/NL_nl.po

upload the mo file, edit wp-config.inc
done