1. Open the PDF that needs a signature with Preview.
2. Click the Annotate tab to display the annotate toolbar.
3. Select the Signature button.
4. If you do not have a signature loaded already, click Create Signature from Built-In iSight…. If you already have one loaded, skip to step 7
   
5. In the Signatures tab, click Create Signature…
6. Sign your name to a white piece of paper and hold it up to your iSight camera.
7. Click Accept when your signature is positioned correctly inside the preview area.
   
8. With the Signature button selected (it should be blue), click and drag where you want to place your signature.

I do a lot of work with PHP, Codeigniter, and Eclipse on the Mac. This is what my .igignore file looks like:

application/logs/(?!index\.html|\.htaccess)
application/cache/(?!index\.html|\.htaccess)
syntax: glob
.DS_Store
*.[Bb][Aa][Kk]
[Bb][Aa][Kk]
*.[Cc]ache
.buildpath
.project
.settings

The first two lines keep my logs and cache directories empty on commit except for the index.html and .htaccess files that are in there. .DS_Store is used by Finder. It’s similar to the desktop.ini file on Windows. The last three lines are to keep my Eclipse project files out of the repo. Everything else is files and directories that I tend to call things.

If you are on Windows, instead of .DS_Store you will probably need [Tt]humbs.db as well. If you are working with Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net, you are going to need a few more things. The ones I can think of off the top of my head are:

syntax: glob
*.suo
*.webinfo
[Bb]in
*/[Bb]in
[Rr]elease
*/[Rr]elease
[Dd]ebug
*/[Dd]ebug

All of this will of course change depending on the IDE, preferences, and framework you are using. This will help you get started.

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.

[Edit May 5, 2012] Very, very late response to a couple of the comments. If this isn’t working for you, you may have to use sudo. In Terminal, type “sudo killall -9 mysqld” (without the quotes). This will allow you to kill the mysqld process with security privileges of another users (such as root).

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.

[Edit May 5, 2012] Very, very late response to a couple of the comments. If this isn’t working for you, you may have to use sudo. In Terminal, type “sudo killall -9 mysqld” (without the quotes). This will allow you to kill the mysqld process with security privileges of another users (such as root).

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.