Archives for July 2010...

Firebug-like Capabilities in Safari Browser

Sat Jul 24 11:31:22 2010

For a while now I have been using Firefox because.. well it's simply brilliant. However I always have found that it sometimes moves like a dog and there are just times when I can't afford to wait around. In some cases, switching over to Safari is faster but it doesn't have Firebug features... or at least so I thought.

On Mac OSX just run the following in Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app ),

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

and restart Safari. On restart, go to any web page and right click to show a pop up menu. Selecting 'Inspect Element' will pull up something that looks very similar to Firebug.

I haven't really played around with it all that much yet but I assume that it doesn't have features such as those found in Flashbug and PHPbug, but I normally use other solutions to those anyway as I have found better results elsewhere. But for your general HTML and CSS, it looks like a good alternative.

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

Sun Jul 11 05:02:51 2010

I've been playing around with a little Ruby on Rails recently and while trying to connect to my MAMP development databases, I came across the following error when using rake db:migrate.

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

I have to admit that this baffled me for a while, but after reading around on the net, it suddenly hit me. 'I'd been having one of my stupid moments', I thought as I added the following line to my database.yml file

socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

I'd been looking for a file in a place where one had no right to be. Why on earth would there be a mysql.sock when there was no sql database? All my development database reside inside MAMP, so it makes sense then that that is where I would find my mysql.sock file.

I realize that this isn't really a big problem for most, but I thought that this could be a potential blind spot for other PHP developers new to Rails and thought I'd best help out.