andyhume.net

Grrr… Go on then.

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. Paperboy
2. Manufacturing factory worker
3. Orchestral Trumpet player
4. Web Developer

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over

1. Ghostbusters
2. It’s a Wonderful Life
3. The Rock
4. The Italien Job

FourTwo Places I’ve Lived

1. London, UK
2. Faro, Portugal

Four TV Shows I Love

1. Red Dwarf
2. Only Fools and Horses
3. Hancocks Half Hour
4. Airport

Four Places I’ve Been On Holiday

1. Alice Springs, Australia
2. New York, USA
3. Milan, Italy
4. Vienna, Austria

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1. Spaghetti Carbonara
2. Bif Pimenta (Pepper steak)
3. Thai Green Curry
4. Shephard Pie like my Mum makes

Four Sites I Visit Daily

1. Multimap.com(does that count?)
2. Arseblog
3. BBC Sport
4. Google

Four Places I Would Rather Be Now

1. Sydney might be fun
2. Beer Halls of Munich
3. My new flat
4. Tomorrow evening

Four Bloggers I Am Tagging

1. Er…
2. Not…
3. Gonna…
4. Happen…

A little tip for those of you running PHP and MySQL services on Os X’s built in web server.

After the update to 10.4.4 you may find that PHP and MySQL lose the ability to communicate with one another on localhost. As far as I can tell, the socket file has been moved in the update and PHP is looking for it in the wrong place.

If you are getting a MySQL error along the lines of ‘Can’t connect to MySQL server localhost through socket /var/mysql/mysql.sock’, then this is probably what the problem is.

The easiest way to fix this is create the directory that PHP is looking for, and link it to the old one. That is easily done at the command line by entering the following.


$ sudo mkdir /var/mysql
$ sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock


In a ill-disguised rip-off of the original and best, Adactio Elsewhere, I have put together my own little aggregating web application. I call it The Dredge Remote, and this is Version 1.

The idea, if you haven’t come across it yet, is to bundle together your bits and pieces from around the web in one unified and smooth, XML and Ajax powered bundle. Currently I have photos from Flickr, links from Del.icio.us, events from Upcoming, and an RSS reader for my favourite weblogs. It’s a great way to learn about the APIs from these different services, and I hope to build more as others become available. If you’ve got any suggestions…

How it’s built

The Dredge “Remote” is built with a whole bundle of technologies. At the back end is PHP and MySQL, which together look after parsing and caching the XML that is pulled in from around the web. I’m using PHP 5 and it’s ridiculously simple-to-use XML functions.

Out front on your browser is XHTML, CSS and a fairly hefty amount of Javascript. The Javascript is completely unobtrusive, and is not required to get to any of the content; but if you do have it available it should do a lot to speed up and increase usability of the site.

As I say, it’s version 1 and it has bugs which need ironing out – not least the interface which could do with being a lot more than simply lots of lists displayed inline.

Incidentally, if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 (or indeed less), prepare for an experience which is slightly more on the shabby side. Technologies used which your sad five year old browser cannot handle include, CSS 2.1 and Alpha transparent PNG images. I would recommend downloading Firefox.

A couple of amusing movies over at Tauquil.comhelp to remind everyone why we just have to laugh at Microsoft evey now and again.

And before anyone slates me as a Mac fanboy, I have no problem with MS including these kind of features in their operating system. They are great features that every modern OS should have. But for the love of God… why do they try and make out that these are innovative features that will be new to the personal computing world?

Will Vista have anything that will make me look and wish Apple would incorporate something like that in Leopard? Have they done nothing new?

Actually, what would really make me chuckle is if MS demo something truly innovative, which Jobs is able to pinch off them, build in to Leopard, and ship before Vista!