The Package

The Welcome Letter

The Loot

Included was: four colored streamers, 10 tote bags, a deck of playing cards, a puzzle, balloons, some promotional stuff, a poster and of course a signed copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.

Installing it on my MacBook was another story. For some reason I couldn’t install the Boot Camp Control Panel off the OSX DVD and so I had to download a hacked version of the file and copy all of the drivers off the DVD. Then I had to run the installer to get everything working and try to find the drivers for the multitouch trackpad. But in the end:

Windows 7 Ultimate x64

=)

Now I’ve fixed many computers, more than I can count, so my troubleshooting skills started to kick in. Problem is, I’ve never had any problems with Macs. So I grabbed the OSX install CD from my MacBook and popped it in, booted, and ran Disk Utility. After verifying the disk and then repairing just for safe measure I restart the computer again. No go. Next I tried to reset the PRAM which cleans out the RAM. Nothing. I let it sit there for a good 10 minutes  with no luck. My last shot was to boot with verbose mode on and check out what exactly is happening.

I’ve never watched what exactly happens during boot but I assumed most of what was going on was normal. After a few seconds it got to a line that kept repeating. Over and over and over. The line went something like this:

com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.mDNSResponder[16]): posix_spawnp(“/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder”, …): No such file or directory

Odd right? That’s what I thought. So after a quick Google search I learned something new.

When you set up sharing over a network in OSX it changes the permissions for Everyone to your drives and usually shares your entire hard drive. Well when you delete the share for your hard drive it resets the permissions. Which is what I did a few days before. When you reboot you start running into problems because the system can’t write to important files. Luckily the fix is pretty easy.

The solution:

• Boot into single-user mode (boot while holding down CMD-S)
• Follow the on-screen instructions to mount the file system as read-write (a fsck command followed by a mount command)
• Type the following: “chmod o+r /” followed by “chmod o+x /“
• Type “exit” to leave single user mode and complete the boot sequence.

Hopefully you Mac users out there who are reading this save it or write this down because you never know when you might need it. My iMac is now running again and hopefully it doesn’t try to play anymore games.

iPhone Wolfenstein 3D

If you even remotely like games and you’ve never experienced Wolfenstein 3D, I recommend you download it for your iPhone pronto!

Also theres an Easter Egg hidden in the iPhone version. If you tap the screen with four fingers the developer console will pop up allowing you to enter cheats.

Wolfenstein 3D Developer Console

You can enter in the following cheats:

• god — Turns on god mode so you won’t be able to die
• give all — Gives you all the keys to unlock every door, the highest level gun (chain gun), and full ammo

Enjoy!

Desktop of the Month: April

And of course…the original.

Desktop of the Month: March

You can download the original here.

Then I remembered SVN. SVN is an open source version control system that’s quickly taking the place of CVS. Some of the features include keeping versions of different files (kind of like Time Machine), user locks if more than one person is editing a file, comparing different versions and of vourse keeping track of changes. I spent almost a week, maybe longer, trying to find all the information I can about it. How to set it up, how it works, all the basic concepts and I even read (Okay skimmed through) the SVN book. Instantly I thought “Yeah okay. I can set this up.” Boy was I wrong.

I know some stuff. Not a ton of stuff. But I can usually work my way around things. I dove into installing SVN head first. Well not *exactly* head first. I had the server techs install it for me. Setting it up however, was all me.

The web server we use is a dedicated server running CentOS and Plesk. I didn’t fully have a grasp on how Plesk works but decided to go at it anyways. I Google’d for some tutorials that people have written or have a similiar setup and found it extremely helpful. The type of system I wanted was to have a subdomain that contained the repository and then have the main domain be a working checkout of the repo. I would also have a working copy locally and anybody else who works on the project.

After a dozen retries and a few times of bringing down the server for a few seconds, I finally got it. Took almost an entire day but I got it. The process basically works like this: I checkout the working folder from repo.mysite.com to my computer. Work on the code, theme, or whatever I need to work on. When I’m finished I commit the changes using either TortiseSVN for PC or in the command line: “svn commit -m “Whatever changes were made”. Then just send the command “svn up” to the server over SSH. I haven’t gotten into post-commit hooks yet to where it’s done automatically but hopefully that will be next.

In the end SVN has changed the way I work dramatically. I set up Apache and PHP locally so I can develop without uploading files everytime to see if it works. Plus I don’t have to keep track of which files have been added, deleted or changed. SVN does that all for me. Once I update the working copy on the server, it takes care of the rest. Setting this up has been quite the experience but I’ve learned a little more about apache and how vhost.conf files work.

If you, the reader, do any type of web development I would definitely recommend using SVN, even if you only use it locally. Trust me. You’ll never go back.

PS: If you guys have some simple questions (maybe more advanced questions later) about setting up/using SVN send me an email or find me on Twitter and I’ll try to help ya out.