I discovered that there’s two Address Book “accounts” on the desktop.  There’s a local account called “On My Mac” and another “iCloud” account.  It’s possible that you might have even more accounts, for example Gmail.  Only contacts added to the iCloud account will sync.  It seems obvious except that there’s no visual indication of which contacts belong to which accounts.   As it turns out “On My Mac” was set as the default account so whenever I created a new contact on my desktop it wouldn’t sync.

My solution was to to first set iCloud as the default account.  From that point on all new contacts would be added to the iCloud account and sync instantly.

That left me with the problem of moving the existing “On My Mac” contacts into iCloud.  So that I could see which accounts were part of the local account I unchecked the “enable” checkbok for the iCloud account.  All of my iCloud contacts became hidden and only the 10 or so local contacts remained visible.  I selected all of the local contacts and dragged them to the desktop, which exported them as vCards.  Next I deleted the local contacts so I wouldn’t have duplicates when I re-import them.  Finally I re-enabled iCloud and dragged the exported vCards back into Address Book.  At this point all of my contacts were in the iCloud account and everything synced as expected.

Once all of my contacts were moved to iCloud I disabled the local account.

This warning technically doesn’t affect or hurt anything but of course after paying for the SSL cert and going through the trouble of installing it, we all want our users to see the green lock icon and not a yellow warning icon!  If you’re running Apache2 the reason for this is that Chrome prefers to use TLS encryption but had to fall back to SSL encryption.  Apache2 supports TLS out of the box but may not be enabled by default.

To enable TLS, open your apache configuration file and add the two lines below:  (The config file is where you previously configured SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile.  It’s possibly located in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled)

SSLProtocol -all +TLSv1 +SSLv3
SSLCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM:!aNULL:+SHA1:+MD5:+HIGH:+MEDIUM

What these lines do is specify that both TLS version 1 and SSL version 3 are supported.  Once you’ve added these lines you need to restart Apache (/etc/init.d/apache2 restart).

If you refresh your browser at this point it’s likely that the warning icon is still there.   Shutting down and re-starting your browser should resolve it.  I suspect that the browser negotiates an SSL connection once and continues to use it until the session expires or the browser is restarted.

One thing that was not packaged in the initial beta release is the Apple Script to automatically accept text invitations.  I find it a huge annoyance to click “Accept” every time a new text comes through.  Fortunately the original iChat AppleScripts work on Messages but you just have to obtain and save it to ~/Library/Scripts/Messages.

Download Auto Accept below and enjoy…

Download AutoAccept.zip

Since it’s turned into almost a daily thing for me to open terminal and kill imagent, I decided to write that into applescript and make an icon so I can just click it.  It’s only one line of applescript:

do shell script "killall imagent"

That’s all there is to it, but in case you don’t know or want to deal with compiling that yourself, you can download this pre-built version of kill-imagent.

1. Install ImageMagick

sudo port install ImageMagick

2. Install imagic module

You’d expect to just be able to run “pecl install imagick” and I would probably try it first.  However the instructions below will work if the automatic installation returns the error: ImageMagick MagickWand API configuration program… configure: error: not found. Please provide a path to MagickWand-config or Wand-config program. ERROR: ‘/private/tmp/pear/temp/imagick/configure –with-imagick=/opt/local/bin/’ failed.

Note version is 3.0.1 in these instructions, adjust the commands depending on the version that is downloaded by pecl.

pecl download imagick
tar xvzf imagick-3.0.1.tgz
cd imagick-3.0.1
phpize
./configure --with-imagick=/opt/local
make
sudo make install

The install process will create a file “imagick.so”, but it may not be automatically installed in the correct location depending on your PHP path settings.  The install will output the location of the .so file so if necessary, you can manually move that file to the extensions directory for your web server.

3. Append to php.ini

extension=imagick.so

That should be it.  Restart Apache and view phpinfo.php. There should be a section for ImageMagick

1.Turn on Apache

Go to System Settings->Sharing and turn on Web Sharing. If necessary click the button that says “Create Home Folder” which will create a folder called “Sites” in your home directory.  You now have a web server that you can access at http://localhost/~username/  (“username” being your own account login name)

2. Edit /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

To enable PHP uncomment (remove the number sign at the beginning of) the line:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

(optional) you can re-map the server root to your home website directory by editing DocumentRoot:

DocumentRoot “/Users/username/Sites”

If you wish to use .htaccess files then look a bit further down AllowOverride and set it to “All” like so:

Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
Deny from all

3. Edit /private/etc/apache2/users/username.conf

Your user directory has it’s own permissions as well which are located in this separate file.  You may wish to enable FollowSymLinks and AllowOverride again here by changing these two lines like so:

Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All

4. Copy /private/etc/php.ini.default to /private/etc/php.ini

OSX includes a default php.ini file that you can use but you must rename or copy it first.  If you don’t do this then PHP will still run but it will just be using the default initialization settings with no way for you to override them.

Edit these settings in php.ini (some of these settings will not come into play until they are installed)

display_errors = On
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
pdo_mysql.default_socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
date.timezone = ‘America/Chicago’
include_path = “.:/usr/lib/php/pear”

5. (Optional) Install PEAR

If you use the PEAR libraries you can install them using the included phar file like so:

sudo php /usr/lib/php/install-pear-nozlib.phar
sudo pear config-set php_ini /private/etc/php.ini
sudo pecl config-set php_ini /private/etc/php.ini
sudo pear upgrade-all

6.  Install MySQL

This doesn’t really require instructions, simply download the latest MySQL from mysql.com.  I installed the 64 bit version.

7. (Optional) Install Apache Plugins

If you use encryption you may need to install mcrypt.  Instructions have been provided by Michael Gracie

If you use the Zend debugger you can install that using these instructions.

Using a debugger really pays off in the long run in my opinion.  It gives you so much visibility and insight into what’s happening in your code and allows you to work faster.  Most developers that I know don’t bother installing a debugger for PHP web applications because either they either aren’t aware of how well it works and/or they think the initial setup is a pain.  The setup does have a few steps but actually isn’t difficult.  This video walks you through all of the steps to install the Zend debugger.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Download links referenced in the video:

Zend Studio Web Debugger (Apache Module):
http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/downloads

Zend Debugger Plugin Install Site (Eclipse Plugin):
http://downloads.zend.com/pdt

Optionally you can download the Zend debugger plugin and install it manually by copying the files to your Eclipse folder instead of using the “Install Site”  That can be downloaded here: http://www.zend.com/en/community/pdt 

Configuration text for php.ini

zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/extensions/ZendDebugger.so
zend_debugger.expose_remotely=always
zend_debugger.connector_port=10000
zend_debugger.allow_hosts=127.0.0.1/32,192.168.*.*,10.*.*.*

First you need to have a server that is running VNC, but most likely only has it’s SSH port exposed. I’ll assume that SSH is on port 22 and VNC is on port 5900 (these are the default ports for these services). I’ll also assume that you have the ssh command and a VNC client installed on your client machine.

1. On your client machine, open a command line window and enter the following to create the SSH tunnel:

ssh -N -p 22 USERNAME@YOURSERVER -L 5901/localhost/5900

Replace USERNAME with your server username, and replace YOURSERVER with your server address (ie verysimple.com or 192.168.1.99)

2. Once you enter this command you’ll be prompted for the server password. Enter the password. You will see no feedback in the terminal window, but the SSH tunnel is now active.

3. Open your VNC client and connect to the address “localhost:5901″ If you have a password set for VNC access then you will need to enter that now. If all goes well, you should see your server VNC desktop!

It might seem weird that you are connecting to localhost in your VNC client. But the the SSH tunnel you created is actually routing port 5901 on your localhost to port 5900 on your server.

If you want to enable these, you can run the following from Terminal:

cp /usr/share/vim/vim72/vimrc_example.vim ~/.vimrc
cp /usr/share/vim/vim72/gvimrc_example.vim ~/.gvimrc

Basically what this does is copy some sample configuration files that enable the additional features.  If you decide you don’t like them, you can just delete ~/.vimrc and ~/.gvimrc and everything will go back to normal.

I’m setting up a new machine and found a great tutorial written by Josh Lockhart on getting a PHP web development environment up and running on Snow Leopard.  This goes through almost everything to be up and running for a typical LAMP stack with unit testing using all of the default services.

Josh’s instructions include everything that I need except mcrypt & IMAP.  Luckily Michael Gracie has provided a walk-through for installing mcrypt on Snow Leopard which involves re-compiling some things, but isn’t as tough as it first appears.  A walk-through for installing IMAP support is available on activeColab (with a pre-built binary).

After getting PHP, mcrypt and IMAP going, the last step for me is setting up MySQL which has some caveats on OSX.  The main problem is that the MySQL installer places the mysql.sock file in a non-standard place and so you have to either create a link or alter your php.ini file before PHP will be able to talk to MySQL.  (If you get “Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/mysql/mysql.sock’” or  “No such file or directory” when calling mysql_connect, then this is the problem)

After completing the steps on Josh’s & Michael’s pages and running the MySQL installation package, here are the additional steps that I like to take to get my local environment configured:

Edit /private/etc/php.ini

display_errors = On
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
pdo_mysql.default_socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
date.timezone = ‘America/Chicago’

Edit /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

DocumentRoot “/Users/jason/Sites”

Edit /private/etc/apache2/users/jason.conf

Append FollowSymLinks to the Options

Change AllowOverride to All

I also like to change the permissions on php.ini and httpd.conf to allow my user account edit permissions and create an alias to those two files somewhere easy to get to.

Installing MAMP is probably easier, but for some reason I prefer using all of the services that are pre-bundled with OSX.  Also Snow Leopard includes PHP 5.3 which led me to find a couple of deprecated functions in some of our libraries.