Posts Tagged ‘mac’

Where the $&@ is Kevin?!

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

Where the $@& is Kevin?!

I am here bemoaning my MacBook Pro. You see? It started back in November...
~~~~~~wavy lines~~~~~
*type, type, type*
FREEZE!
"What the?!"
Reboot!
Blue screen (yes, the mac gets them too)
"crap!"
Reboot
Blue screen with spinning beach ball of doom
"Double crap!"

My hard drive died. What's more, my hard drive died and I didn't have ANY backup. Yes, I'm a geek and I wasn't backing up my drive!

I bought my mac 9 months prior and didn't get AppleCare, so I bought my replacement drive at OWC. Having bought drives there before, I trust them. I spent the next 4 months building back up my data and recovering what I could.

April
spinning ball is back! It appears when I try to do ANYTHING. I try everything including virus software, disk utilities, wiping the drive and reinstalling. Whenever I try to recover anything from backup, the BALL and slowness! Finally the backup drive stops responding and IT dies. WTF?!

I give up and take it to the Apple store. They have it overnight and return it to me with an apology. They say the hard drive is failing but since it's not the original Apple drive, they can't replace it. Really?! You can't replace this drive because it's the replacement for the Apple hard drive that died 4 months prior? Sigh

I'm not bitter

BTW- I might be bitchy about their policy, but the staff was nice and (amazing as it was that this happened 3 days after I was there) [this] was not me.

Sent From My iPhone

Tags: ,
Posted in Geek Dad, Geek Technology | No Comments »

Have a Mac? You Have a Web Server! part 1: Installing Your Server

Monday, March 15th, 2010

This is a 3 part series on setting up a webserver on you Mac- it's my first how-to, so give some feedback, please!

Nowadays, it's incredibly simple to setup a home web server. I've been a Web Designer since 1998 and a Mac user for far longer than that. When I started building websites, serving sites from a Mac was impractical. There was no inexpensive solution- Webstar was the only robust server for the Mac and it started at $500. Along came Mac OSX, and with it, the Unix underpinnings it was built upon. SWEET! the Mac Desktop was now a LAMP platform (Linux-Apache-Mysql- Php), a robust, enterprise-class web server...almost. It wasn't very easy compiling PHP and Apple's installs of Apache and PHP were minimalist...

I'm getting too geeky-speaky, aren't I? Let's get to the meat!

How to setup a robust PHP/MySQL server on your Mac:

Download and install MAMP (Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP)

The easiest solution I've seen to date is the MAMP Server. It's easy to install, incredibly rock-solid, and FREE (though you can spend $70 to upgrade to the pro version- and I did :)! "MAMP" is a play on "LAMP", which I mentioned earlier.

  1. Download that Beotch!
    Download the MAMP server [here].
  2. Install that Beotch!
    Double-click on the downloaded file and a disk will appear on you desktop.
    Drag the folders to your Applications Folder as they tell you to do.
  3. Run that Beotch!
    Go to your Applications folder, open the MAMP (not MAMP Pro) folder and double-click on the MAMP icon.

Once you startup MAMP, the Apache (and PHP) and MySQL Servers will startup and, BOOM!, you're a web server!

Open a browser, type in http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English and you'll see startup page with links to your PHP information page, MySQL Database admin tool (PHPmyAdmin) and FAQ page.

If you notice the ":8888" after "http://localhost", that's a "port number"- you'll want to change that in the MAMP preferences to "80". That way, people won't have to type ":8888" after your web address to see your website.

The default location for your website files are in the MAMP application folder in the "htdocs" folder- you can change the location to somewhere "less obscure" (like your home folder's "Sites" folder) in the MAMP preferences under "Apache".

Setting up a PHP/MySQL site is beyond the scope of this article, but I recommend this book for beginners :)

Next segment- Connecting your computer to the outside world!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Geek How-To | No Comments »