Sam’s random musings

Radmind Assistant:

Radmind made easy. Honest!

One of the most under-appreciated utilities on OS X has to be radmind. Anyone with more than a handful of machines that isn’t using this, or any of the commercial alternatives like NetOctopus, FileWave or Casper from JAMF Software, should really sit down and have a long hard think about why they aren’t.

A common, and somewhat justified, complaint with radmind in the past was that it was just too large of a learning curve to get started with. However, with the recent release of Radmind Assistant 1.0 you can set up an entire radmind solution without getting your hands dirty on the CLI.

So stop surfing slashdot for a few minutes and read through the docs on this.

(Via AFP548 Full Feed.)

Run PHP5 in PHP4 mode:

Today, I had to track down a bug in my application which only occured with PHP4. The problem was that I use PHP5 and I couldn’t reproduce the bug with PHP5. So I needed PHP4 on my machine. I installed php4-cgi, but for some reason I was not able to configure it correctly (I am not an Apache guru *g*). After more searching I found a hint of a special property in php.ini with which it is possible to run PHP5 in PHP4 mode. That property is:

zend.ze1_compatibility_mode

After enabling this property, I was able to reproduce the bug.

OOO good tip

(Via cake baker.)

Speeding up MySQL on Mac OS X and Mac OS X server:

Speeding up MySQL on Mac OS X and Mac OS X server: Basically: you want to add “skip-thread-priority” to your my.conf, or use “–skip-thread-priority” when you start up MySQL on an OS X box. There’s an assumption about how thread priorities are ordered which isn’t true on OS X. By turning this off, you can significantly improve your overall database performance. On some of my databases, I’ve been able to double the queries-per-second just by setting this value. [Cool.]
Source: Chuqui

Need to try this on some machines and benchmark.

(Via Spoken.)

Really Simple Consolation:

From time to time, I get dragged into the Mac OS X Console application. Either it’s because I’m printing debugging output via NSLog and Xcode has suddenly stopped showing it in the “Run” window, or I’ve just started seeing some wiggy stuff happen with my computer and I need to check under the hood.

OK I must be a real geek now, because this was helpful NOW, rss feed of my console log COOOL

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

FeedLounge Scalability:

There is a great conversation going on about web applications and scalability, with FeedLounge as an example.

A few months back, there was a meme going around talking about how cheap it was to build a web based application/service/company compared to our recent past. While this may be the case in various instances, the scalability needs of today’s web applications far outreach the needs of yesterday’s tools.

UPDATE: another post from Jeremy.

Some good quotes here as well as lots of good reading in the linked to netries (and comments)

(Via alexking.org: Blog.)

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p>LordKingSquirrel.com: ArcWeb and PHP Mini-HOWTO (Parts 1 & 2):

Over on LordKingSquirrel.com, there’s a two-part series on integrating your scripts with the ArcWeb web services systems.

Creating mapping applications for the Web with ArcWeb Public Services can be daunting at first, so here are some helpers to get you started. Part of the code used here comes from Andrea Rosso’s fine example.

In part one, they help you set it all up, giving a little background on the SOAP protocol you’ll use, and then moving into making the actual map (and displaying it).

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)

Onne Gorter - Home/programming/mac-os-x/:

Using C++ library with Cocoa What? If you have a library written in C++ and you want to use this library in your Cocoa/XCode project this is how you can go about. Why did I write this? It took me hours of googling trying and tinkering with XCode. Actually it is not that difficult, but you just need to know a few things.

keep track of this

(Via .)

ModSecurity (mod_security) - Open Source Web Application Firewall:

ModSecurity is an open source intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications (or a web application firewall). Operating as an Apache Web server module or standalone, the purpose of ModSecurity is to increase web application security, protecting web applications from known and unknown attacks.

Well, this looks like something to keep an eye on

(Via .)