Thankfully, there is a pretty simple fix. To begin with, make sure MAMP is shut down. Next, open Terminal. To open Terminal either open Spotlight (Cmd+Space) and type “terminal” or you can find Terminal in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder.

Once you get Terminal opened, type the following:

ps aux | grep mysql 
lsof -i 
killall -9 mysqld

That’s it. Start up MAMP and MySQL will come back up just like normal. Another option would be to simply change the port number MySQL is using in MAMP. Restarting your computer may work too but I did’t try that.

I guess I never noticed it, but I have a lot of menu icons! In order from left to right is:

Adium
Waveboard
Tweetie
BetterTouchTool
Alfred
Dropbox
Google Notifier – Calendar
Google Notifier – GMail
Caffeine
MobileMe Sync
Time Machine
Bluetooth
Wireless
Audio/Volume
Time
Spotlight

Check out a screenshot of all of them on my desktop:

I have to say the Magic Mouse is almost the best mouse I have ever had. I say almost because with both the Logitech mouse and Mighty Mouse, I had a way to do application Exposé without touching the keyboard. For most people, this isn’t a big deal. But I spend a lot of time on the computer. Shortcuts like that really help.

I’m pretty sure Apple is working on updating the Magic Muse driver to do it now, but in the mean time, you can use BetterTouchTool. I have it set right now to three finger click opens up Exposé. I can easily change it to a two, three, four, or five finger click, or tap, or swipe. It’s a pretty nice little program. If you gave a Magic Mouse, I recommend you try it out.

Even if you don’t have a Magic Mouse, you can still use it on multitouch touchpads on the Macbook and Macbook Pro.

[Update Jan. 11th, 2009] There is also MagicPrefs which looks like it does the same thing. I haven’t tried it because BTT is working great for me.

To get around the NuFile problem of creating a new file, I am using QuickSilver to open the application and then save the file wherever I want it. Or saving the file to the desktop and dragging it into the folder where I want it. Not as quick as the context menu but it gets the job done.

As far as SCPlugin is concerned, I needed a subversion app right away. So I started downloading a bunch of them to see which one I liked the best. A lot of them didn’t run on Snow Leopard. The ones that did, they were too complicated and it annoyed me or they didn’t notify me if there was an update. Which is important to me. I don’t want to check for an update manually. I wanted the app to check for an update and then left me update it if and when I wanted. I liked svnX up until I wanted to add a folder with 4 levels of subfolders in it and one file inside of the last folder. I ended up having to add the folders one by one. So I dropped that right after that experience. Plus it was difficult to get to work with repositories that required a username and password. You would have to go to Terminal to accept the certificate.

Then I landed on Versions which everyone thinks is the greatest subversion app for the Mac. I tried it out. It was good. Much better than all of the other subversion applications I had tried previously.

Then I found Cornersone. It did everything Versions did, but it did it better and quicker. It has a very nice inline content viewer as well. It also felt smoother and more stable to me. It also plays nice with repositories that require you to log in with a username and password and also saves the information in the keychain. Both are about the same price (Cornerstone is only $1 cheaper). Now that I have Cornerstone and see its power, I don’t even see myself going back to SCPlugin even if/when they update to work with Snow Leopard.

If you are getting an error similar to “Error: Could not connect to MySQL server!”, rather than having to reinstall MAMP (which sometimes doesn’t work), here’s a fix:

1. Quit MAMP
2. Open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
3. Type “killall -9 mysqld” (without the quotes)
4. Start MAMP

It should be working now. If not, you may have to sudo the command (“sudo killall -9 mysqld”)

Another option is to go to Appliacations/MAMP/db/mysql/ and delete anything is is NOT a folder. I didn’t have to use this option so I can’t vouch for it myself. According to forum postings it works though.

The error was “403 Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server” Navigating to any folder would give me the 403 error as well, even http://localhost:8888/MAMP/?language=English.

This was a pretty simple issue to correct. Not simple enough at the time though

1. Stop all MAMP servers (Apache and MySQL Server)
2. Navigate to Applications/MAMP/conf/apache
3. Open httpd.conf
4. You can probably open it with TextEdit. I opened it with Dreamweaver. Just make sure TextEdit is editing it in plain text format and not rich text format.
5. Find the following section of code (on mine it was on line 378):
   <Directory />
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride All
   </Directory>
6. Change “AllowOverride All” to “AllowOverride None“
7. Save the file
8. Start MAMP and test the pages.

If that doesn’t work for you, you can always Google it. The MAMP forums have a lot of posts about it.

Cool OSX Apps
TinyAlarm
MacUpdate
Mac Specialist – Essential Mac OS X Software
SCPlugin
Titanium Software

The first screensavers I found for it was called Soundstream (Mac), which I blogged about not too long ago. Soundstream reacts to noice around the computer to create explosions of light. Very cool screensaver.

Recently I found a few more screensavers, all made by White Knight Logic. My personal favorite is called Strands (Mac, Windows). It is simple a bunch of strands of string that glow that move across the screen. Click on the link. It’s a lot cooler than I make it sound. A couple other cool screensavers are Metamercury and Filigree (both Mac, Windows).

If you really like the Windows Vista bubbles screensaver, Mac has one too, call Bubbles X.

Briblo (Mac, Windows) is a pretty nice screensaver. It builds Legos on your screen. Fliqlo (Mac, Windows) is a nice, simple screensaver too. It is a flip clock similar to the evil ones that you always see at the DMV.

Do you like the nebula wallpaper that comes with Mac? I do. Then DiscoBrick (Mac) may be for you. It uses over 70 3D nebula images and zooms through them like a starship would fly through space.

Next up is the Plasma Tunnel (Mac) which makes a black hole type tunnel bith with bright colors like plasma.

The last two screensavers I just found today. The first is called Anèmona (Mac). It mimics a large body of water in the way that the particle movements are fluid. It is similar to the next screensaver, however it’s motions are random. The final screensaver is LiquidMac (Mac). It requires a laptop computer with a motion
enabled sensor (MacBook family, MacBook Pro family, and
some of the latest PowerBooks). It mimics the behavior of liquid by
creating a particle system that reacts to the computer’s orientation. Meaning that the way you tilt the computer the particles will move according to the way you tilted it.