Tangential Musings

This is a straightforward guide on how to setup and use Xdebug 2.1.1 with webgrind 1.0 for PHP Performance Profiling on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Xdebug is a powerful debugging and profiling tool for PHP. While, webgrind is a web-based alternative to kCacheGrind, which allows you to see bottlenecks in your code. [...]

This is a tutorial on how to setup Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3, and MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Tomorrow, I’ll be starting my first day at BetterWorks and figured this tutorial would be a good reference for when I have to set up my development environment.

While I’m a big fan of nginx (pronounced: “engine x”) this tutorial uses Apache 2.2, which comes preinstalled on Snow Leopard. [...]

This is a straightforward guide on how to setup and use Xdebug 2.0.4 with webgrind 1.0 for PHP Performance Profiling on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Xdebug is a powerful debugging and profiling tool for PHP. While, webgrind is a web-based alternative to kCacheGrind, which allows you to see bottlenecks in your code represented by how much time is spent on each function either in percentages or milliseconds. Basically this will help you figure out which functions are sucking up your resources. [...]

For those of you who didn’t learn your lesson in, The No BS Guide To Getting Things Done, here is something further to waste your time reading. Hopefully this will point you in the right direction (or maybe not). Oh, and guess what? It’s incomplete. Why? Time management is a waste of time.

Time management is simply focussing on your priorities. Productivity is when you work on those priorities.

Now, you can read the rest of this drivel or smarten up already and get to work! [...]

Step 1: Stop reading this and do what you need to do!

If you’re still reading this stop! Seriously, quit wasting your time with blogs and other distractions and just get to work. Focus, focus, focus. Productivity books, articles, audiobooks, manifestos, etc. are all major timesinks (i.e. significant wastes of time). I wouldn’t even know what that term meant if I took my own advice!

The only real secret to getting things done is to get to work. [...]

The following command will remove all .DS_Store files in a directory where it is executed as well as that particular directory’s subdirectories:
find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete

Why would you want to remove .DS_Store files? The .DS_Store files store Finder-specific preferences concerning the display of each of your folders. Removing these files is an easy way to reset your display preferences. Also, if you’re moving files between your Mac and another operating system such as Windows or Linux these files can cause unexpected problems and should be removed prior to transfer. [...]

I don’t personally use the MAMP application nor do I condone its use. However, a reader posted a comment asking how to setup virtual hosts within MAMP. So here you go: A simple guide on how to setup named-based virtual hosts in the MAMP environment. [...]

I find that when I read a PDF document on my computer I like to take notes. Sometimes I get really lazy and just copy and paste chunks of text into a text file for future reference. But just a moment ago I tried to copy a bit of text and it said I needed a password! I didn’t want to type up a whole page of content so what I did was hit command + p on my Mac (or for Windows ctrl + p) and then under the “PDF” drop down menu clicked “Save as PDF…” [...]

This is a simple guide on how to setup name-based virtual hosts in Apache on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). This tutorial is intended as a supplement to my article, How to setup Apache, PHP, & MySQL on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

What are virtual hosts used for?
In the case of this tutorial we will create a virtual host to let us access a subfolder on our local web server at a custom address like http://application/ or http://application.local/ instead of having to type in a longer URL like http://localhost/~shortname/application [...]

This a very simple guide on how to change a file’s date modified and date created attributes on Mac OS X (this should work on both 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard). [...]