svnX is a great mac GUI for svn repositories. A lot of our svn servers are accessed via non-standard ports for security, and a limitation of the svn+ssh syntax is that you can’t specify a non-standard port in the address name. To get around this in the command line, you can set a local environment variable “SVN_SSH” like so: More…

I’ve found the best way to install symfony on Leopard is to use the version from SVN. I find this is easy to do, and easy to update in the future. Here is a cheat sheet for those looking to get up and running with symfony on their Mac running 10.5 Leopard. More…

Mac OS 10.5 Leopard ships with Apache2 and SVN. However, if you want to keep a local svn repository and not use an external svn server (only really useful if you have projects which you will be the only developer), you have to set up the repository yourself. Here is a quick cheat-sheet to help you do just that. More…

I’m sure this happened to a lot of us, but I started out with my Windows Boot Camp partition about 5GB. My only intention was to use it to test out our web sites in multiple windows browsers. However, after installing all of the Windows XP updates, service packs, VMware tools, multiple IEs, and Firefox, I only had about 400 MB of free space available. I finally hit the tipping point where to install new software (SPSS) I would need more space. No way did I want to go through starting from scratch. Downloading all of those windows updates took FOREVER. So, here is how I managed to resize the Boot Camp partition and still get it to work in Fusion. These steps were performed on a MacBook Pro running Leopard and a Windows XP Boot Camp partition formatted as FAT32. More…

When I start work on a new web project I usually create a new virtualhost on my development machine so that I can access a local version of the site at something like http://myproj/ instead of http://localhost/~myusername/myproj. I use a nice little shell script written by Patrick Gibson called virtualhost.sh that handles this task on OS X. One little snafu I run into depending on my ISP is that their DNS servers will sometimes capture my local request to the domain name and try to redirect before my request even hits my local server. To fix this, you have to edit your local hosts database. Open up /private/etc/hosts and add a line like:

127.0.0.1       myproject

Now, any requests to http://myproject/ should be recognized as a local host and your DNS servers will no longer redirect you.

Just discovered this by accident: If you want a list of files in your project or any sub directory, drag the item from the file drawer into a document. A nicely formatted list of all of the files will automatically be placed into your doc. Now… if only I needed it. Maybe someday.

Using an SSH key to connect to the server allows you to log in without entering your password.

To generate an SSH key on Mac OS X or Linux machines:

• Open a Terminal window and enter:

ssh-keygen -d

Unless you set an alternative local storage location when prompted, your public key will be stored in ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. For increased security enter a passphrase when prompted, however this is probably not necessary unless many people use your computer.

• At the command line enter the following and copy the output to the clipboard.

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

• Log in to the server.
• Switch into the ssh directory:

cd .ssh

• Type:

vi authorized_keys

• Paste your public key from the clipboard, then save and exit vi.

If you want easy access to your commonly used applications, here is a tip that will save you some time. Drag an application icon up to your finder tool bar to create little shortcut icons in every window. You can click these icons to open the application, or better yet, drag files onto them to open those files with that application.

I use this feature with TextMate to open up new projects on the fly, and with Preview to get a quick look at documents that otherwise would open up in Photoshop of Fireworks.

With claims that it is up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2 I thought I would give the new Safari 3 beta a run-around. Turns out it gave me the run-around as first it required a restart after installation and then would unexpectedly quit every time I tried to open it. Our advice: wait until it becomes more stable–at least enough to open it–before you download it.

This was on a Powerbook G4 1.5 GHz running 10.4.9 and 2 GB of RAM

• pipe svn output with | mate

You can get a great view of the changes you’ve made in a file under version control (with svn) if you pipe the command through to TextMate:

svn diff web/myfile.php | mate

You can also do this with svn cat:

svn cat -r## filename | mate

This will open up the resulting diff output in a new document in TextMate, all color coded and ready to go.