Do you have a Mac still running Tiger (Mac OS 10.4)? And did you recently decide to install a PEAR component for use with some PHP? And lastly, did it fail with some cryptic HTTP error "410 Gone" that you had very little luck finding with Google? I did.

The solution is a bunch of steps backward and then forward again. Unfortunately, it's not very clear to the perhaps large number of Mac users who did not keep their PEAR libraries up to date all along on Tiger. But the answer is here, at the moment (it will scroll off when more news is added): http://pear.php.net/

I run a couple of Drupal sites on 1and1 for historical reasons (3 years free). A while ago, I dutifully upgraded them to Drupal 5.7. And was surprised to find that PHP's register_globals was enabled.

All this time, I've been running with a .htaccess file which explicitly disabled that setting -- if 1and1's Apache was running mod_php only, it turns out. Apparently, such PHP settings in .htaccess files don't do anything if running PHP in CGI mode.

Here we are, 2 years after the first Intel Macs went on sale, and 3 years after Steve Jobs announced that Apple would transition to Intel CPU chips. Wouldn't one think that all major makers of Mac software would have long since ported their software to work on Intel Macs?

I too have now run into the infamous Time Machine bug. Little did I know. I upgraded my 3 Macs to Leopard back around December 1. On my primary Mac Mini desktiop, I pointed Time Machine at my external 250Gb drive, which also had some large video files on it, but which was mostly otherwise empty.

I was profiling one of my favorite large PHP applications today using APD. I kept getting what seemed to be strange results -- it was telling me that bunch of defines statements (30+ of them) were responsible for an inordinately large percentage of the page generation time. On minimal pages it was as much as 37%. Even on the well-known largest of pages, they were still clocking in at a not insignificant 5%.

That just didn't seem possible.

Here's a table which lists all Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 core compatible modules, indicates whether they have been ported to Drupal 6 or not, and for which of those branches a simpletest directory exists.  (1350 lines)

So I just did several Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installs, upgrading from Tiger (10.4) and even one machine from Panther (10.3). Although for the most part they went well (though very slowly),I have a few complaints. Some things are stupidly difficult, because Apple's obtuseness, combined with the plain complexity of the system (required, I suppose, to get the functionality), but mostly just because of the lack of documentation. So here are some:

Or how to get what you want without cutting code...

I have a Drupal 5-based website for use by my extended family and friends to keep up with my own family while we are overseas. Most of them are far from being sophisticated web users, and seem to be having a challenging time remembering how to log into my site. So what I needed was a way to get them onto the site once and then persist their sessions for a period of time.

After posting Why I don't like WebDAV, part 1 I got involved in a bit of email discussion with some people who are much more expert than I regarding the protocol (Kevin, Mike, Julian, Tim). I appreciate they included me, and I now know a lot more about WebDAV than I did before.

The protocol itself doesn't really suck. Rather, it's the implementations and the purposes for which it has been used, it seems. It's a bit odd in that it's a lower-level protocol for a high-level purpose. Use it for the wrong purpose, and it's like using the wrong tool.

Yesterday and today I spent a lot of time using WebDAV updating one web site, and creating another, both at hosts which use that protocol for accessing file directories on hosted sites. It has taken longer than it should have, possibly caused my Mac OS X 10.4.10 desktop to crash, and ultimately forced me to use both the shell and FTP to get permissions set right and the right files in the right places. It shouldn't be this hard. Part of the blame may lay with Mac OS's native implementation of WebDAV, but I've not seen any implementation that is better on the whole.