Apple has released the Mac OS X Lion USB Drive, but I doubt it’ll be a hit for $69. Ouch. If you have already bought (and upgraded to) the Lion, you can create your own Mac OS X Lion Install drive using any spare 4.3Gb+ (8Gb to be safe) USB thumb drive. Here is how.
Insert your USB drive into a USB port, and launch the Disk Utility. Click your USB drive in the drive list at the left, and select the Partition tab. Change the volume name to Mac OS X Install.
My WordPress has been acting up recently, throwing mysterious “IO Error” errors every time I was trying to upload a PNG file. Upon closer examination of the Apache logs I’ve found yet another cryptic error line for every failed upload attempt:
[notice] child pid 14139 exit signal Abort trap (6)
Reinstalling the PHP5, GD and libpng failed to fix this for me, so I’ve decided to check the loading order of the PHP extensions in the extensions.ini. Indeed, the gd.so was being loaded the last. Moving the “extension=gd.so” line to the top of the list fixed this problem for me after a restart of Apache.
So give it a try before googling for the “Abort trap (6)” error like I did, the search results contained mostly mailing list noise and bug reports fixed in earlier versions of PHP.
VMware has released recently the next major version of its virtualization platform for Mac OS X users: VMware Fusion 4. It has more than 90 new features and optimizations, and one of these is the support for the latest Mac OS X Lion 10.7, and VMware folks have made the installation a super simple process. You can download the 30-day trial version from VMware website, or buy a copy for $49.99, a bargain for such a gem.
1. Launch the VMware Fusion 4, and Select New… from the File menu.
Most of the web developers that use Apple computers have to somehow test their projects under Microsoft IE7, IE8 and IE9 browsers. Achieving this is possible by using the virtualization software: Wine, Parallels, VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, with the added cost of a Windows license (or by using the Adobe BrowserLab, but that’s a different story).
Well, here is a way how to accomplish this totally for free, by using the Oracle’s free VirtualBox and the free Internet Explorer testing virtual machines from Microsoft. The latter need a bit of tinkering to make them work under the VirtualBox, and there is a script to that for you automatically. Continue reading