Sunday, 3. September 2006, 10:29:13
mac, mysql, gui, client
...
Every once in a while it's good to have a GUI client to access databases. I used
CocoaMySQL for Mac OS X a few years ago, but the development has unfortunately frozen in 2003. While the functionality is still just fine it's really slow when using the official PPC binary
Fortunately there are unofficial universal binaries available. Download them from
theonline.org. Oh and don't forget that you can access remote MySQL databases using SSH tunneling:
ssh -fNg -L 3307:127.0.0.1:3306 you@yourhost.com
Everybody loves dolphins, right?
Tuesday, 11. July 2006, 05:37:46
mac, printer, driver, samsung
I thought there was no way of getting my Samsung ML-1710P printer to work on an Intel Mac. Samsung USA no longer supports Macs, they've got some anchient no-good drivers on their site. But luckily the good folks down under do still support it! Thank you Samsung Australia! So just download the
latest driver from Samsung Australia, install and print on
Just to be sure I've also got a
backup of the file (20040714091350156_SPL2.dmg).
Thursday, 22. June 2006, 17:55:54
mac, macbook
While slot loading drives are cool, they're somewhat unreliable. I know of a 12" PowerBook that refuses to eject due to a warped case. I've never had physical problems with the drives - sometimes my 12" iBook just refused to eject the disk, but a boot with trackpad button always ejected. Keep in mind that there's no "pinhole" for force eject on these things...
Today I was burning a DVD on my MacBook and closed the lid by accident. I opened her up, but the disk was borked: naturally I couldn't mount the disk, but I couldn't eject it either. I decided to shut down and eject during startup. Unfortunately the MacBook (+ Pro) are built so that they read the disk before trying to eject. And once the disk was not readable it got stuck in an infinite loop of reading the disk. I
could not boot to any OS so the machine was useless.
I tried holding the machine in different positions, but could not get it to eject. Finally I fired up the iBook and surfed around and found
this blog entry. Mike Sivcevic had the same problem and solved it by sticking a bent piece of card board to stop the drive from spinning up.
I bent a business card and put it in the slot. After a few whines I heard the eject function and the disk popped out and OS X boot up. Victory!
But this is some bad engineering from Apple... I'll always feel weary of inserting disks
