/dev/notes

If you're trying to add a user to a group under OSX you might get stumped. This is straight forward enough on linux right, you go

$ usermod -a -G thegroup theuser
  

And job done. But OSX uses Open Directory rather than traditional flatfiles like /etc/passwd and /etc/group to store information about users and domains. So the typical unix commands we are used to, don't work.

The dscl (directory service command line) utility lets you manipulate Open Directory values and in our case, add a user to an additional group, handy if for example, you want to add your user to the wheel group to make use of password free sudo.

$ dscl localhost --append /Local/Default/Groups/<groupnamehere> <usernamehere>
  

I'm just going to jot down my experience with my new Macbook Air. It will be rather more a stream of consciousness than structured prose, so my apologies in advance for that. I'll clean it all up later.

Anyway, quite happy with it so far, but like any geek with new kit, I want to know everything about it, and make it dance to my whim.

Two things learned this morning: if you have an old Magsafe (1) powerpack, which I did from my old 13" Mac Pro, and it has higher or equally rated wattage you can use it with your macbook air.

It makes sense, a high rated powersupply can support a lower power rated device, but not vice versa. So a 60 watt Macbook Pro magsafe can power a 45 watt Macbook Air. But a 60 Watt Magsafe can't power a 15" 85 watt macbook pro.

The other thing which I have discovered, is that the thunderbolt port on the newer Airs use the same socket form factor as the mini display port. This means is if you have an old Mini DisplayPort -> DVI adapter lying around, you can reuse it.

So, back from the Linux jungle and sitting in front of a Macbook once again.

My first real job has been to get a decent unix environment up. OSX's BSD utilities don't really cut it. Macports is far and away the best distribution out there.

Once you install coreutils and get ls, find etc it makes sense you will want to change your shell to a modern version of bash (or zsh if that's the way you roll).

Lion ships with bash 3.2 whereas Macports will give you a contemporary version 4.2 Unfortunately it's not as simple as going

$ sudo port install bash
  $ chsh 
    <input /opt/local/bin/bash>
  

I had to do this before, but I'd forgotten there's a trick to changing your shell in OSX to a non-standard location. The file /etc/shells contains a list of valid shells chsh will permit. You need to edit (as root or via sudo) this file and add your macports shells. Once that's done chsh will let you change no problem.

If you're running OSX Snow Leopard and Macports MySQL, you might run into some drama trying to get Ruby and Mysql playing nicely together.

This can manifest itself in a number of ways, but the most common, I think, is what happened with me

aaron ~/Development/ruby/testapp $ rake db:create (in /Users/aaron/Development/ruby/testapp) Couldn't create database for {"reconnect"=>false, "encoding"=>"utf8", "username"=>"dbuser", "adapter"=>"mysql", "database"=>"testapp_development", "host"=>"127.0.0.1", "pool"=>5, "password"=>"testpwd"}, charset: utf8, collation: utf8_unicode_ci (if you set the charset manually, make sure you have a matching collation)

Seems the mysql driver gets confused a little bit as when you install the MySQL Rubygem as directed by Rake, you link against the bundled OSX MySQL and not the Macports one.

The solution is to install the mysql gem as follows (uninstalling it first, if necessary)

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

Substitute the mysql_config5 path with your own macports mysql_config path. Afterwards, everything should work fine.

aaron ~/Development/ruby/testapp $ rake db:create (in /Users/aaron/Development/ruby/testapp)