I am not putting the apps in a Top # order but in order how many times I use it, or the importance for the app to me.

Coda

Coda is in my eyes the holy grail of web development apps in the genre Text editors, but it’s so much more then just a text editor. Many people prefer Text Mate, I’ve tried that too, but once using coda u never go back. Hehe. Coda is lightweight and fast to use, It has build in Sites to save your sites obviously, very easy to use. And it has a build-in preview option, but I don’t use that, I prefer switching to Firefox. What I do use is the build in Books option, this lets you view for instance the PHP documentation, and you can easily search the books. For more information about all functionalities of coda like Sites, Preview, CSS, Terminal and Books visit their website.

Visit coda’s website

Pipette

Pipette is a quick and handy tool to easily grab the color of any pixel on your screen, and copy the HEX code to your clipboard. Its fast and lightweight which is pretty important to me. Having to wait for an app is very frustrating while developing.

Visit pipette’s website

Transmit

Transmit, from the same developers as Coda. Again is the holy grail in the genre FTP apps. Very easy to use, and the app design is very slick. It also has an Sync option which synchronizes your local folder with the external folder, a time saver. Also the performance of the app is super fast. For more information visit the Transmit website.

Visit Transmit’s website

Querious

For many years I used phpMyAdmin for mysql database management, but since I found Querious I never touched it again. Having mysql management directly from my desktop saves time, works faster and again in a slick design. You can easaly connect to the mysql database server directly, or use a SSH or SSL tunnel. More info visit the website.

Visit Querious’s website

Firebug

The number one extension for FireFox for web developers, I simply can’t or won’t do my work anymore without this extension. Inspect elements, debug AJAX responses and output, you name it and Firebug has it. If you are a big fan using Firefox while developing u should definitely have Firebug enabled. It’s a must have for developers.

Visit Firebug’s website

Versions

When you are using Subversion while developing your project, Versions is a handy application to check timeline’s, checkout your work or browse the repository, view changes etc. If you are using Coda it is not required since Coda has Subversion build in. But I like to use this app to view changes or check the timeline. Also it’s easy for checking out changes to multiple sources.

Visit Versions website

Billings

Time management, client management, invoices, project timeline etc. Billings has it all. I use this application to log my work by simply turning on the timer. You can add working slips to your project and invoice these to your customer. They also have a nice iPhone app which connects to your Billings. To view all the functionalities visit the Billings website.

Visit Billings website

QuickSilver

I simply can’t and wont work on a Mac without quicksilver, it’s a time saver for sure. Easily start your applications by simply typing the name and hitting return. This should be standard on all mac’s if you ask me. I think all mac users also know this app, at least all mac users I know have it installed and can’t go without it. Check it out.

Visit QuickSilver’s website

If you have a nice app that fits on this page please post a comment Share what apps you use.

I found a nice little app, well, a friend gave it to me. It’s called MagicPrefs. It allows you to tune your mouse a little bit more advanced then Apple’s prefs. You can also create your own gestures for the mouse. Quite a handy app. All magic mouse owners should check it out here. magicprefs.com

I’ve been using my Xbox 1 chipped with XBMC for over 4 years now, and it has served me some good times. But as the movie quality keeps improving, or increasing in size, the Xbox doesn’t have what it take’s anymore. For example, viewing a movie in 1080p quality is simply not possible. Mostly because the file format MKV is not supported, or weakly supported.

A friend of me was talking about his new HTPC running on Snow Leopard with XMBC and it got me thinking, running Snow Leopard om my TV sounds good to me anyway. And being able to finally view Full-HD movies on my TV (witch it has never done before) is something i really want, I’m done watching crappy DivX’s.

Of course it never comes cheap, for a reasonable priced hardware configuration you come somewhere near 400 – 450 euro’s. And if I want a nice casing that fits next to my amplifier it costs me even more. The same goes for ’sound reduced’ hardware. So I think I’m just going with the average hardware and put this in a basic casing, and hide it behind my couch Maybe put some sound reducing stuff in the casing to reduce the annoying fan noise.

- Edit, Turns out HTPC casings are not that expensive after all. Found one for 60 euro’s, Looks like it’s going to be next to my amplifier afterall

The configuration I have so far is priced around 400 euro’s. I will start the project once I have the hardware obviously.

Today I received the packages, even got better memory for free because the one I ordered appeared not to be in stock. I installed the hardware in the casing, all went smooth. Now im busy installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.1 on the machine, but can’t seem to get it working.. i’ve tried the iATKOS v7, SnowOSX 3.6 but they didn’t work for me. SnowOSX did but sound was not working and the bios keeps resetting on reboot.

The fix seems to be in the Snow Leopard 10.6.1-10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD by Hazard package, but I downloaded the wrong version. Downloading the right version now but its going kind of slow. I’ll keep you updated on progress.

These are the options I used up till now:
- VoodooHDA
- NvENABLER
- Chameleon RC4
- ElliotForceLegacyRTC
- OpenHaltRestart

Turned out I have to patch the Snow Leopard 10.6.1-10.6.2 SSE2/SSE3 Intel AMD by Hazard dvd first with an update, I wasted 2 good DVD’s on that! And my last ones, I ordered 100 DVD’s on cdrwinkel.com just in case. Now going to the store to get 1 or 2 DVD’s to burn the right image.

A few day’s ago I completed this project, but obviously forgot to update this post because I watched some 1080p movies That means the project was successful, but it was a pain in the *ss. Installing OS X on a normal PC is not that easy you might read somewhere. For some reason I got everything working except for my videocard. Strangly, a friend had the exact same card, but from a nother manufacturer and that one did work. Strange. We traded cards and now the HTPC is running Mac OS X 10.6.2 like a charm! Got XBMC installed, and placed the box in my livingroom. It’s looking kinda cool there! Btw, the DVD I used was “SnowOSX 3.6“. Some pics soon.

-Edit, some pics below! The HTPC is the one on the left.

I don’t often write something to my blog, mostly because I can’t find the time or the subject to write about, or the subject I can disclose to the public that is ^^. Anyway, I want to bust two bugs in one slap. That is writing something that is helpful to anyone interested and also for an archive of my projects. Often I start a personal project, mostly it doesn’t get completed because i get pulled of due other projects that actually bring food on the table. But this time I’m approaching it from another direction. Making my projects public for anyone to read. This keeps me motivated to complete the project and hopefully get some nice feedback from it.

My first project I’m posting is installing Xen 3.0.3 on a fresh server. Recently I’ve sold my webhosting company because I did not have the time, nor the long-term motivation for it. I’ve sold the company including the servers. But I managed to keep one server for myself and friends. This server is going to be used in this project so that I and my friends can have their own Virtual Machine.

Note that this is entirely new for me, and I don’t have any experience on virtualization what so ever, if you can provide me with any helpful feedback it will be appreciated

For some reason I have chosen to use Xen, why I don’t know exactly, other then its open source and according to the manual very easy to setup. I did look into other possibilities but it seems Xen is the most complete, and free software for virtualization. Also build by some of the most experienced companies out there, that gives me a big boost in confidence on support, communities etc.

I will update this post frequently on the status of the installation, how I did it and a complete log of installation commands that worked for my server. So if this post intrigues you, bookmark it!

Project is finished. This website is now running on a Virtual Machine!

I’ve chosen to use CentOS 5 because I’m familiar to this operating system and it’s easy to use. I’m using this OS for my dom0 setup, and also for the clients (domU).

Just got back from the datacenter, picked up the server I’m going to use for this project! After 2 years non-stop serving websites I thought let me clean the inside from dust, but surprisingly there was none.. at all..

Attempted to install a clean CentOS 5 installation with the netinstall ISO, appears my dvd-rom is broken, replaced it with new one; The DVD itself is not OK, that was my last one.. Need to get to the store later. me 0 – 1 preparation.

Today I configured the RAID, I’ve chosen for RAID10 with 4x 250GB hdd’s. This gives me 500GB disk space and a mirror for safety Building the array obviously took a long time. Got new CD’s, burned the netinstall ISO and booted the installation thought a HTTP mirror, works like a charm. But there seems to be an error with the GRUB loader after installation, I tried to fix it for a couple of hours, google-d my ass off but can’t seem to fix the problem. Called in the help of a friend who happens to be an expert in my eyes. Waiting for him to arrive and hopefully he knows how to fix it.

Problem turned out to be the RAID10 configuration, somehow CentOS doesn’t ‘take’ it. Also Ubuntu doesn’t like the RAID 10 configuration. Now i configured 2 times RAID1 for all 4 disks. Still gives me 500GB of storage, and mirrors. Installed CentOS 5.4 thought netinstall, now installing Xen.

– Well, installing Xen was pretty much easy. These are the steps i made:

I want to store all my VM’s on a big disk, for me that was the root disk. I created a folder on /data/vms/ for my virtual machines. After that I simply ran:

yum install kernel-xen xen

This installs Xen and the xen kernel. And it automatically adds the kernel to the Grub boot menu. You do have to make sure it’s set as default so it will boot that kernel on startup.

nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

Change the value of default to 0 (make sure the xen kernel is above other’s).

Reboot your system,

shutdown -r now

And it should boot from the new Xen kernel now!

To check if it is, run

[root@server ~]# uname -r
2.6.18-164.15.1.el5xen
[root@server ~]#

And we are done. We can setup virtual machines (domains) now.

That was pretty simple too, Xen comes with a tool that prompts you with the questions. You only have to enter the name and path basically for Xen to setup the VM. Type:

virt-install --prompt

When Xen ask’s for the Install URL you can use the images for your prevered flavor of linux, or what ever OS you want to install. I used CentOS for my first VM.

After installation, if you want to automatically boot your VM type on the domain-0:

ln -s /etc/xen/<vmname> /etc/xen/auto

For a list of Xen commands you can visit: http://xen-tools.org/software/xen-shell/commands.html

Well, it was a fast project for sure, all went easy as h*ll, except for the RAID10 issue. But everything is running smoothly and I have 3 VM’s running on the machine. Going to set it up in the datacenter again somewhere next week, And migrating this website to it! Thank you for reading, commenting is allowed And since it’s Queens Day here in Holland, im out partying now, bye!

Visit the demo for download, and please comment if you like it and use it, it’s kinda fun to see it in a working project.

Update: On request i added MySQL database support, the script now saves the blocks into DB and pulls them out

Update2: I get allot of good responses but also many feature requests, so i decided to ask you script users what you would like to see as a new feature in the script, and i will try build it all in. Please type a comment on what you would like to see build in

I assume you already have apache installed, if not, you can follow my tutorial on that too. Open up your apache config, usually found in /private/etc/apache2/

Add the following:

Click here for the vhost config, my code syntax highlighter messes it up

Next thing up is, install DNS Enabler (buy if first ofcourse) and copy these settings:

(click image to enlarge)

And make sure you set the DNS in your system preferences to localhost, e.g.:

Thats all! Now you can add a directory in your root e.g. /data/www/test and go to it in your browser with http://test.local.dev

Your footer that bitches about how your site doesn’t work in IE6 and you don’t care, tells me that you don’t know enough about your profession to make it work in IE6. Don’t whine that your code doesn’t work, figure out a way to make it work. There is more than one way to mark up a page.

No one wants to hire a whiner, they don’t even want to know there was a problem. It’s your job to find it and fix it as if it didn’t even exist. If you can do that, you will surely go far.

By http://noahstokes.com

Some people like to install other software like MAMP or XAMPP but i like to do it without installing other software other than Mac OS X shipped with, well of course we need to install some things but no all-in-one packages.

You may want to install the Developer Tools (xcode), you can find these on your Leopard DVD, or install the developertools from the apple site. These are required if we are going to compile extensions for PHP.

Lets start with enabling PHP, open up Terminal, and type: sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and type in your password. Find the line that loads the php5 module:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

And remove the # before LoadModule.

Save the file (ctrl+x) and restart Apache, you can do this in System Pref’s by unchecking the Web Sharing service (Sys prefs > Sharing), or you can type it in Terminal: sudo apachectl restart

Lets install MySQL, i dont exactly know why apple did not ship this too, but fortunately MySQL made a nice prefpane for this. Download the package (dmg) at the MySQL website Install it, and start it in your pref pane (Sys prefs > MySQL)

Only thing we have to do now, is connecting MySQL with PHP, type in Terminal: sudo nano /etc/my.cnf and insert:

[client]
socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
[mysqld]
socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock

and then:

sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo chown _mysql /var/mysql

All done, you now have Apache with PHP and MySQL, optionally we can install xdebug, there are a lot of known problems when doing this, so here’s what worked for me instantly:

Download the Komodo Remote Debugging package and extract the xdebug.so from the 5.2 directory, and move it to /usr/libexec/xdebug.so

Now open your php.ini file at /private/etc/apache2/php.ini and add this line:

[xdebug]
zend_extension=/usr/libexec/xdebug.so

Now, restart apache again with sudo apachectl restart, and you should have xdebug installed!
If not, or you come up with some errors, please comment and ill try to help.

Optionally, if you want to make local development a little bit easier you can follow my other tutorial: Making local development a little bit easier

• Installing Subversion
• Installing Trac
• Configuring Apache and Authentication

So, lets begin with installing Subversion. I used the Yum package manager but whether you install it from source or not doesn’t matter that much. We are going to need the packages ’subversion’ and ‘mod_dav_svn’, the last one is for serving Subversion repositories through Apache HTTP Server, which i assume you already have installed.

[root@repobox ~] yum install mod_dav_svn subversion

Thats basicly it for installing, the configuration was where i lost time, now lets continue installing Trac.

I installed Trac also again in combination with Apache, now we need python and mod_python:

[root@repobox ~] yum install python mod_python

And we need the mysql-python plugin so python can connect to MySQL, you can download the tarball from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python, then compile the package:

[root@repobox ~] tar xvzf mysql-python-tarball
[root@repobox ~] cd mysql-python-dir
[root@repobox ~] python setup.py build && python setup.py install

Install Clearsilver, this is a templating package used by Trac, you can download it from http://www.clearsilver.net/downloads/

[root@repobox ~] tar xvzf clearsilver-tarball
[root@repobox ~] cd clearsilver-dir
[root@repobox ~] ./configure –with-python=/path/to/python && make && make install

Usually the python path is /usr/lib/python2.4 or whatever version you installed

When you have installed all of the above we can continue with installing Trac, first download Trac from http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracDownload

[root@repobox ~] tar xvzf trac-tarball
[root@repobox ~] cd trac-dir
[root@repobox ~] python ./setup.py install

All done, now we can configure both subversion and Trac with Apache, and create some user authentication.

We are going to create config files for apache, vhost and trac:

[root@repobox ~] cd /etc/httpd/conf.d/
[root@repobox ~] touch vhosts.conf

Now, nano subversion.conf and put in the following:

   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath /var/www/svn

   # Limit write permission to list of valid users.

      AuthType Basic
      AuthName "SVN Authorisation"
      AuthUserFile /etc/svn_trac-auth-conf
      Require valid-user

This allows you to view the repository’s using http://example.org/repos

Now first lets create a svn repository

[root@repobox ~] svnadmin create /var/www/svn/projectname
[root@repobox ~] chown -R apache.apache /var/www/svn/projectname

And a trac project to go along with it

[root@repobox ~] trac-admin /var/www/trac/projectname initenv
[root@repobox ~] chown -R apache.apache /var/www/trac/projectname

Now lets add some security

[root@repobox ~] touch /etc/svn_trac-auth-conf
[root@repobox ~] htpasswd -m /etc/svn_trac-auth-conf username

Now trac has been setup, lets create a apache link to it:

[root@repobox ~] nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/trac.conf

Add the following:

        SetHandler mod_python
        PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
        PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
        PythonOption TracEnv /var/www/trac/projectname
        PythonOption TracUriRoot /trac/projectname

Now you can open trac on http://example.org/trac/projectname