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Seeing my partner’s brand new MacBook Pro came with a spanking new 200GB harddisk I thought my measly 120GB disk was just not enough.

I found a nice Western Digital 320GB harddisk that was quite cheap, and set about taking my Macbook Pro apart. Note to self, not a good idea to start such projects on the coffee table when drunk. The procedure went fairly smoothly since I had my Torx screwdrivers handy.

With the old harddisk out and the new one in I started installing a new copy of Mac OS X. I had my trusty USB harddisk recovery tool handy so I was able to plug the old 120GB disk into the Mac’s USB port and use the Migration Assistant to copy over my profile to the new drive.

I just love the Migration Assistant, without it this job would have been a longer more painful process….

Anyhow, after two weeks of using the new drive I’ve had a minor catastrophe.

Coming home one afternoon I took out my bag and found Macbook to find it red hot. The machine had been running inside the bag and with no air circulation…. Yikes! I thought at first it might be something to do with the Sudden Motion Shock detection systems messing with the auto startup, but no it was the lid sensor.

I put the machine to sleep and held it up; pinching the closed lid made the machine start back up. Obviously the magnetic sensor that detects the position of the lid was slightly out of alignment. I’m sure an apple technician could re-align it, but instead I just changed the lidwake behaviour.

$ sudo pmset -a lidwake 0

Typing this command sets the computer to not automagically start up when I open the lid, instead it starts when I hit a key or touch the mouse.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

After a week of waiting after Launch, I gots my iPhone!

I’ve opted to switch to Optus as their plans are by far the best of any of the other Carriers. Telstra’s plans were a joke, and I’ve got no love for Telstra. Now, to make back the money spent by making squillions developing cool apps!

I spent a little time this morning setting up my Mac Mini with the standard development junk (TextMate, iTerm, etc) and started working on adding webserving gear. Apache of course comes default with Mac OS X and PHP was easy enough to setup with DarwinPorts.

MySQL however proved a little challenge; it installed fine with DarwinPorts but wasn’t playing nicely. Feeling lazy I googled a little and found MAMP; the all in one package with Apache2/MySQL/PHP and a schwag of other junk.

It’s not designed for true Mac OS X server’s in mind of course; you’d be silly using it for anything other then development.

So far so good and it’s playing quite nicely.

Oh and for Ruby on Rails I use the aptly named Locomotive!

Just quick plug of a new Widget I found today called WordPressDash. It’s just thing for adding 5 minute rants (see previous post) and various other quick edits.

Through reading a link on Slashdot on how the Ruby on Rails cool-aid is so much better then PHP (it’s apparently like comparing Java to Assembly) that I have done what I usually do and read tons and tons about Ruby and these Rails. Which brought me to a cute little movie on how to start out with rails featuring TextMate, the missing OS X editor.

I’m an avid fan of Vim, and I love it to death. I am also an avid fan of simplicity whilst Vim does provide in a convoluted way TextMate just seems to ‘click’. Whilst TextMate is quite new (ver 1 for a few months now) and it’s website front page has got enough moving things (albeit with a purpose) to make me sea sick there is definately a ring to it.

So I took the plunge this morning and downloaded a fresh copy, played with it for 15 mins and decided that it was cool enough to be placed permanetly on my dock. Then with a few clicks I purchased a copy (about $67AUD) through PayPal using the profits I made of selling some junk on Ebay… So now it’s Textmate time!

Let’s see if it makes me any more productive with my wp-mail hacks…

Was hunting in the Network section in Mac OS X for a way to add a second IP address. Failing to find anything helpful I used trusty ifconfig!

sudo ifconfig en0 alias 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.0

Won’t work on reboots, but a nice little hack. Thank you Apple for using BSD!