Recently I tried to empty the trash on my Mac only to be continuously prompted with “cannot delete, file is locked”. I found the guilty party was Windows Media Player (because the best place for that on a Mac is the trash – use VLC instead!). It didn’t really matter what the file was, I [...]

I wrote a little tool to help me command line test URLs in my mod_perl dev environment. It lets me pass ful URLs + query strings via the command line, and see, or more importantly, debug the output. Apache is running with mod_perl and we are using the PerlHandler to forward requests to. There’s really [...]

I do a lot of work that requires me to log in and out of remote machines using SSH. As a result, I prefer to configure my laptop (working machine) to SSH without prompting for a password on those machines I know to be secure. Here’s how to do it.

While I was working on one of my client’s web site, I realised that I hadn’t taken any note of the (hex) colours during my mock up phase. Initially thinking I should download a colour picker, I realised I could probably drag and drop.

I recently came across a funny bug where I was executing an AJAX method and the response was empty. I check the server side and I know that my particular query is returning a result, but thanks to Firebug I can see it’s failing in the browser. So there was something definitely amiss.

Following my accident a couple of weeks ago, I’ve now been blessed with a new MacBook Pro which needs setting up again. So, I thought I’d document setting up MySQL, PHP5 and Apache with multiple virtual hosts.

During some recent browser testing for a web site I’m building, I was faced with IE stripping all the CSS out of my site. It worked in Firefox (both Mac & PC), Safari and Mac IE, but not PC IE. So what would cause just IE to fail so spectacularly?