The 3 machines I used are an iMac 27″, a MBP and a Mac Mini all running OS X Lion with MAMP 2.0.5 and Xcode 4.2 installed

You are going to need the following software.

1. Macports dmg http://www.macports.org/install.php
2. Latest version of PHP (At this time it is php5.3.10) http://www.php.net
3. Apple Xcode v4 or above

If you have any problems please drop me a comment and I will do what I can to help out.

Now, on with the process. This is not a quick one so make sure you have time to do it and that your MBP (if using one) is mains powered.

1. Install Macports, that you have downloaded by running the dmg and installing via the pkg.

2. Open terminal and run

sudo port install ImageMagick

3. Once this is complete run the following,

vi /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/envvars

4. Comment out the following lines:

• # DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH = “/Applications/MAMP/Library/lib: $DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH”
• # Export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

5. Add this at the end

export PATH="$PATH :/opt/local/bin"

6. Now create the directy to add the latest php version to.

mkdir /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include

7. And change the permissions

sudo chmod -R 775 /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/

8. Download the php source code of the latest stable version of PHP 5 from php.net if you haven’t already.

9. Navigate to the include folder you have just created

cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/include/

10. Navigate in to the include folder

11. Un tar the php file

tar -xvf /path/to/php-5.3.10.tar.gz

12. Rename the file

mv php-5.3.10 php

13. And navigate in to it

cd php

14 Run the following to configure php

./configure

15. Rename the current pear configuration file

mv /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/pear.conf /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/conf/pear.conf.original

16. Install imagick

sudo pecl install imagick

17. When asked for it type the imagickdirectory

/opt/local

18. Add the following to the php.5.3.6 php.ini file via MAMP template editor

extension = imagick.so

19. Navigate to the extensions folder to check if the imagick.so is there.

cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/

If its not there then it needs to be copied from the location where it has installed. In my experience this could be in /opt/local or /usr/lib/php/extensions. Either way copy it over to the extensions folder in MAMP

cp /location/of/imagick.so /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.6/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/.

You may also need to change the permissions on the recently copied file.

chmod 777 imagick.so

Restart MAMP. Done!

Issues:

As I mentioned I had some issues when doing this, one has been covered off the other one was related to macports not working. At step 2 I received sudo: port: command not found. To overcome this you need to add the following to ~/.bash_history

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:/opt/local/share/man
export INFOPATH=$INFOPATH:/opt/local/share/info

Now resource the .bash_profile

source .bash_profile

Now I know some will think why not just have an account with GitHub instead of going local? Well I didn’t want the expense or for these to publicly available. Also, I didn’t need one as I generally work on the same local network just on different machines.

Step 1 – The scenario
As I said I work on an iMac and a MBP, both machines are running Lion, not that this has a baring on matters. I have a 250GB spare hard drive that I set up as a Time Machine back up disk some time back and thought this would be just the thing to house my projects. I enabled file sharing on both machines and ensured I could access each one from the other. To note the external drive I attached via usb to the iMac.

Step 2 – Remote setup
The first step was to initialise git on the drive. This requires that you have the knowledge to install git on a mac, if not its easy, google it! To initialise git on the back up drive I found this the best way:

a) Open terminal (on mac) and navigate to the external drive. Create a folder for the project,

mkdir -p myproject

b) Enter the folder and create a new folder called .git

mkdir -p .git

c) Now enter this folder and run the following command

git --bare init

You now have an empty git repository ready to be pushed to and pulled from.

Step 3 – Local setup
We now need to set up the first instance of the project on one of the machines, the iMac will be first. Navigate your way using terminal to the project folder on the iMac, if you need to set it up you can use the same command as I used in step 2 part a. Enter this folder and run the git init command

git init

You now have an empty repository. I am assuming here that you have a project ready to be pushed so the next part is to add all the files. At this point you can either add all the files or create a git ignore file. This is up to you depending on the project and which files you do not want to pass. Things like cache and log files are best to be ignored. To create the git ignore file run

vi .gitignore

You can now add the folders and /or files here and save.

Step 4 – Adding the remote repo and project
Before we add the files we need to add the remote repository on the external hard drive. Run

git remote add NAME /PATH/TO/EXTERNAL/DRIVE/REPO.git

The name part here is what you want to call the repo, I generally use local for locally stored repos, makes sense. We are now ready to add the project, run

git add .

and then commit using

git commit -am "Add a comment here"

I appreciate there maybe other ways to do this, I am just using one method that I find works best for me.

Step 5 – Ready for the push.
We are now ready to push the local files to the remote repo on the external drive. Run

git push NAME master

We are using the master branch here, we haven’t yet created any branches so this is all we have. You will notice files being pushed to the local drive and once done we are ready to set up the other git repository on the second machine and pull to it.

Step 6 – Second machine
This is fairly straight forward as all the steps have been done already so its a case of repeating them. On the 2nd machine follow these steps.
a) navigate to the project folder and run the following commands

git init

git remote add NAME /PATH/TO/EXTERNAL/DRIVE/REPO.git

1 And thats it.

Step 7 Notes
it is worth remembering that if you have add files/folders to the .gitignore then these will need to be created. Some other projects I work on use systems such as Symfony2 and CS Cart which do have cache and logs that do not need to be kept so the folders which these are stored in are ignore and thus need to be created on all machines where the application is being developed.

Looking at the Apple support site this seems a common issue. I have a iMac 27″ which also has the Lion upgrade on it with no issues.

Some suggestions lead to Adobe Flash player and disk permissions. Neither of these has solved the issue for me, some say it does but I have had no resolution to the issue.

The only thing so far that is working is to enter the password immediately when the box appears.

Lets hope Apple fix this soon…

This has caused some frustration I can tell you and will be doing for some others out there I’m sure. Don’t fear or give up, there is an option.

Apple have added the “Duplicate” function to the File menu, although this doesn’t have a short cut but it will create a copy of the current document. This can then be saved as a new document with a different/amended name in the location of your choice. Command S will see to that once the document has been duplicated.

Not as simple as “Save as” but still does the job.

Locate the file “bookmark-template.php” in the wp-includes folder. The line you require is around the 99 mark if the file is previously unedited. Look for:

$output .= '<a href="' . $the_link . '"' . $rel . $title . $target . '>';

All you need to do is add the rel=”nofollow”

$output .= '<a href="' . $the_link . '"' . $rel . $title . $target . 'rel="nofollow">';

NOTE:
Ensure you have all rel options in the link settings set to none. This seem to override this setting.

Locate terminal in the Applications->Utilities folder. Once the app is open you need to enter one of the following commands. The command is ependant upon the version of OS X you are running. If you are upto date and are running OS X 10.5 or above you need to enter this on the command line:

dscacheutil -flushcache

If you are running OS X 10.4 or below then enter this on the command line:

lookupd -flushcache

The sun setting in Whitby, England. Taken whilst on holiday with my girlfriend Jessica in June 2011.

I am in the process of adding my old blog posts to this site form my old blogs, stevedurr.co.uk and stephendurr.com. keep checking back for updates or subscribe to the feed.

Thanks

Steve

The css font tag looks more baffling than other css shorthand tags, take the border tag for example:

border : 1px solid #000;

A 1 pixel solid black border, easy. Now take the font tag shorthand..

font: italic small-caps bold 12px/18px Verdana, Arial, serif;

What on Earth is that all about… Well, if we break it up we see that we have:

Style, Variant, Weight, Size / Line Height and Family.

The first 3 aspects, Style, Variant and Weight are all optional as is the line height. If line height is omitted then so is the forward slash that splits size and line height. The family must always come last and along with the size is mandatory.

I had no idea it was that simple.

Here’s how

I created 2 functions, php_to_mysql() and mysql_to_php

PHP to mySQL

function phptomysql($php)
{
	//Break the date up in to an array
	$php = explode("/", $php);
	//Re=arrange the date in to the US format
	$php = $php[1] . "/" . $php[0] . "/" . $php[2];
	//Convert the date (string) in to php time format
	$php = strtotime($php);
	//Format the time value in to a php variable in the format of mySQL datetime field
	$php = date('Y-m-d H:i:s', $php);
	return $php;
}

mySQL to PHP

function mysqltophp($mysql)
	{
		//Change the mySQL date to a time value.
		$mysql = strtotime($mysql);
		//Format the time value to the UK date format
		$mysql = date("d/m/Y", $mysql);
		return $mysql;
	}

This one is much simplier. As we do not need to involve a re-arrangment of the date from US to UK, we can just format the time value to the UK format straight off.

Example

View the date formatting in operation