Glen Scott - Keeping it simple, since 1977

Okay, so there are not really any Mac specific virus threats, but there are tonnes for Windows… and you don’t want to be passing these on to your PC owning friends right? Best be safe…

• Download and install ClamXav
• Launch ClamXav application
• Go into preferences and click the Folder Sentry tab
• Drag your Downloads folder from the Finder to the Folders Being Watched pane
• Check the Launch ClamXav Sentry when you log in to this computer option
• Log out and log back in to your account and you will see a new item in your menu bar indicating that Sentry is monitoring your Downloads folder
• The Sentry uses Growl notifications if it finds anything suspicious

Good deal from Mac Heist: get Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac, half price. Be quick, offer ends today!

Mac Heist

code_swarm is a fantastic application that visualises software projects over a period of time by analysing their code repositories. It aims to show in a graphical manner the users working on a project, and the number of files committed. Some great example videos are available, including a video of the Apache webserver project.

code_swarm

Using Firefox 3 is really a different experience from using OS X. It’s not Windows, it’s not OS X and it’s not Linux. It’s something else.

• Firefox 3 brings Ugliness to the Mac
• Firefox 3 download

John Gruber on the iPhone upgrade dilemma:

So what it boils down to is whether you think it’s worth $199 up front — plus $15 extra per month for the new data plan with SMS — for faster cell network data.

The iPhone 3G Upgrade Question

I have one invite to the Fire Eagle beta to give away. Just leave a comment if you are interested.

What is Fire Eagle? From the site:

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online.

Fire Eagle

Buried deep inside the press release announcing the Yahoo-Google search advertising deal, is an interesting point about the company’s respective messenger clients:

In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users.

I’ve installed a new Wordpress Theme to freshen things up a bit. It’s called Spotlight and I think it’s a nice minimalist design, with enough flair to keep the page looking interesting.

Let me know what you think!

PEAR was removed by Apple from 10.5 for one reason or another. Here’s how to get it back:

Pre-requisties

Make sure you have a php.ini file in /etc/. This isn’t available by default. To create one enter the following:

sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

PEAR Install

• cd
• curl -O http://pear.php.net/go-pear
• sudo php go-pear

This starts the interactive install script.

• Press Enter to start install
• Press Enter to use no HTTP proxy
• Type 1 and press Enter
• Enter /usr/local/pear as the path and press Enter
• Press Enter to confirm the install directories
• Press Enter to install PEAR_Frontend_Web-beta,
  PEAR_Frontend_Gtk2, MDB2 by default

The installer will also alter the include_path in your php.ini file to include the new installation directory, so just press Enter when prompted

The PEAR Package Manager

To make using the command line tool easier, we are going to modify our shell path. Add the following line to the end of your ~/.profile file:

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/pear/bin"

After saving your .profile file, log into a new terminal and type the following to confirm that everything is working

pear version

If all is well, you should see the following output (or similar):

PEAR Version: 1.7.2
PHP Version: 5.2.5
Zend Engine Version: 2.2.0
Running on: Darwin glen-scotts-macbook.local 9.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.3.0: Fri May 23 00:49:16 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.5.18~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

For more information on using the manager to install and maintain packages, see the PEAR manual for the command line installer.

Clean up

rm go-pear

I have a love-hate relationship with PHP’s class repository (and answer to Perl’s CPAN), PEAR. Sometimes you can find very useful, well documented and cleanly implemented packages. And obviously re-using such components is a big-win. Sadly, the quality of PEAR varies wildly and frequently I stumble upon useful looking packages that have little or, worse, no documentation. This situation, regardless of the underlying code, puts me off more than anything.

It’s odd, as writing examples and documentation is a pre-requisite for new PEAR package submissions. The question is, should the PEAR developers be more strict on what they let in?

PEAR :: The PHP Extension and Application Repository