mac

After looking around for how to make an alias for Mac OS X's terminal/shell I ended up cobbling together my solution from a variety of different (mostly unixy-linuxy) places. So in the name of good documentation, here is the magic formula for the next time I need to set up an alias for happier command line hacking:

1. First we edit/create a profile. For a normal user do:
   pico /etc/profle
   ...or for root/superuser do:
   
   pico ~/.profile
2. Add your alias like so to the file:
   alias aliasname='mycommand /path/path'
   (notice no space between equal sign and ')
3. Save your changes and close the file
4. Load/reload your profile with:
   . /etc/profile
   ...or for root/superuser do:
   . ~/.profile
5. If you are using root/sudo you will need to use sudo -i in order to load the profile upon login (more info about this here).
6. Done.

I've been wanting to upgrade to MySQL 5 for a while now, and after hearing that MySQL 5 is required for Drupal 7 I decided to bump up my upgrade schedule, pronto. If all one wants is MySQL 5 then that is easy enough -- go download MAMP and you're done. But what if you want to be able to dev on MySQL 4 for projects that require it for whatever reason (e.g., clients who are run it and are not willing/able to upgrade MySQL at the moment)?

Well, with not a lot of effort - it very easy to have a PHP 5, PHP 4, MySQL 5, and MySQL 4.1 environment - all sharing the same doc root and servernames (e.g., urls):

After spending 3 days trying to get Elipse PDT and the Zend debugger working on Mac OS X, my nerves were very frayed, indeed. Apparently, there has been an ongoing problem with the Zend debugger not stopping at breakpoints on Mac Intel machines...something that has plagued Eclipse through 3 different PHP extensions. (don't even get me started on how crazy it is that Eclipse has seen three completely separate PHP plugins within less than a year)