It was very frustrating installing a fresh WordPress on my Mac and finding that the permalinks didn’t work. Turns out the default Apache settings for personal web sharing on OS X disable .htaccess overriding.

sudo mate /etc/httpd/users/yourusername.conf

Now you’ll want to enable Apache to follow symbolic links:

Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks

And to allow .htaccess overriding:

AllowOverride All

The file should then look like:

<Directory "/Users/yourusername/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Now in System Preferences, stop and start ‘Personal Web Sharing’. Things should work perfectly now.

This semester at University, I’m taking ‘Compiler Design & Techniques’ as a module. The second coursework involves drawing Finite State Machines diagrams that represent regular expressions. Rather than using a word processor to draw these diagrams with a rather untidy look about them, I went in search of a tool that’d help me produce high quality drawings. I’d heard that Latex was good for mathematical diagrams, but that seemed like overkill as I only wanted the diagrams, not a whole new document syntax to learn.

(more…)

I’ve had a bit more time recently to play around with Ubuntu and am finding the ‘Ubuntu versions’ of apps that I’ve grown to love on Mac OS X. One of which being Hot Corners which I always use to lock my screen when moving away from it.

Brightside is the Ubuntu app to do the job.

sudo apt-get install brightside

Once installed, go to System, Preferences, Screen Actions. I then checked the “Bottom right corner” and then chose “Start screensaver”. Works a charm.

Be sure that in your Screensaver settings to check the “Lock screen when screensaver is active” option.

Here’s a great Mac screen saver to get you in the Christmas spirit–LotsaSnow. It generates unique snow flakes that then gently fall down from the top of your screen. It’s very customisable and it’s a Universal binary.

Fancy a change from the default prompt you get in your Terminal? Want to mimic the Terminal prompt used in Lost? I did, and during a boring lecture at Uni, decided to update it.

(more…)

I was very lucky to be able to help out in beta testing CSSEdit 2. I’d be totally lost without this app as I’m constantly using it for all my web design projects.

It helped build the designs for this blog and countless others, as well as my James Bond site, CommanderBond.net.

It really speeds up development for me compared to writing the CSS rules out.

Congratulations to Jan for a great release!

I was extremely sceptical at first to try the optimised Firefox 2.0 builds, because each time I’d used a build like this before, I’d never noticed a significant speed difference. Well, Paul Stamatiou said it was “noticeably faster”, so I thought I’d risk wasting 5 minutes giving it a try.

And? It is a ton faster! I was already impressed by the speed gain from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 with the official release, but this optimised build must seriously double the page loads for me. Also, the UI just seems more responsive as well. Give this a try for sure.