Wednesday 23 October 2013

Apache, MySQL and PHP in OS X Mavericks 10.9

Unfortunately upgrading from OS X Mountain Lion ( 10.8) to Mavericks (10.9) stopped my AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation working.



Luckily, this is just down to an apache configuration file being overwritten and is easy to correct...

1. Edit Apache Configuration

sudo vi /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

a. Uncomment following line to re-enable virtual hosts: -

    Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

b. Uncomment following line to re-enable PHP: -

    LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

2. Restart Apache

sudo apachectl restart


There was no need to change any of my MySQL installation, this continued working after the installation.

Sunday 1 September 2013

Installing Streamripper on Mac OS X via Homebrew

Here's a quick post on how to install "streamripper" on OS X, with a little help from homebrew.



1. Install homebrew

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

2. Check installation

brew doctor

3. Fix any issues

I had the message "Warning: /usr/bin occurs before /usr/local/bin"...

To fix this, edit "/etc/paths" and change the order of the directories.

On re-running "brew doctor", you should hopefully now get the message "Your system is ready to brew."

4. Install "streamripper"

brew install streamripper

5. Run streamripper

streamripper http://(your stream URL here)

6. Play files

If you want to listen to your MP3 recordings from the command-line, you can use the built-in OS X "afplay" command.

afplay file.mp3


Homebrew Notes

Here are some additional notes on homebrew.

Software is installed into directories inside "/usr/local/Cellar/" with symbolic links created in "/usr/local/bin".

For example, after installing "streamripper", a directory "/usr/local/Cellar/streamripper" will be created (along with some other dependencies), and a symbolic link "/usr/local/bin/streamripper" will be created which points to "../Cellar/streamripper/1.64.6/bin/streamripper"

To get the latest packages and homebrew: -

brew update 

Upgrade the installed software with: -

brew upgrade

These commands can be combined as: -

brew update && brew upgrade

To uninstall softeare: -

brew uninstall imagemagick

There is a great on-line package browser here: http://braumeister.org/


Friday 22 February 2013

Quick Wipe of Hard Drive using Linux

This is what I have found to be the quickest way to wipe a hard drive under Linux (you can use an Ubuntu Live CD to do this).

sudo shred -v -z -n 1 /dev/sda

(where 'sda' is whatever your drive is - sda, sdb, sdc etc)

The parameters used in the above example are: -

  • -v = verbose (show progress)
  • -z = add a final overwrite with zeros
  • -n 1 = Overwrite 1 time (instead of the default of 25)

This should overwrite any sensitive data on the disk once followed by zeros. Modern hard drives shouldn't need more than one pass overwrite anyway according to this article.

This method is by far the fastest that I have found - some of the other methods were estimated to take 3 days to complete on a 250GB hard drive, this way only took an hour or two.