Category Archives: OSX

Ahhhhh… you need to mount a friend’s pendrive… or you have an external HD with a Windows partition, and you’ve just realized you need to add your Mac NTFS support?.

You came to the right place!. Yes, there are a couple paid options… like tuxera and paragon. Both of them are good options, but they cost a couple dollars. And… we just wanna read a couple files… we’re not gonna be living with NTFS the whole time, right?.

So, if that’s the same scenario you’re living with, let’s proceed with a free option!. Open up your browser, and open OSX Fuse’s website. You’ll need to hit the downloads tab, and install the DMG.

OSX Fuse is an extension platform… so we’ll need to install another component. Let’s open another browser tab, and let’s download NTFS 3G.

After you install NTFS 3G, you should be able to mount any NTFS partition…. at no cost.

Nice, right?

So… you thought that OSX was the most stable OS ever developed… right?. Guess what… you can crash it super easily. Just try the following…

• Open any OSX app. For instance, Safari.
• Type in the location bar the following string:  File:///
• See the crash onscreen?

It’s been reported in OpenRadar, and astonishingly, it’s only affecting the latest incarnation of OSX, Mountain Lion. You can crash Chrome, Safari… and probably, any app you’ve got installed.

What’s all the fuzz about?. Crashes can be used to get ownership of the IP pointer.. which is, in layman terms, the guy that says what-to-execute next. Long short story, this could potentially be used to develop an exploit, to scale permissions in the system.

Let’s wait for a patch… 10.8.3 is taking quite a long time to ship.

I really like codeIgniter, since it’s super lightweight, and its learning curve is super small. You can get to build a whole website within just a couple days, even with database support.

I’ve written myself a e-commerce website in just two weeks, without having previous knowledge on the technology. Now, let’s get to business.

What happens when you’re writing a view (php based), and you need to display a variable?. Well, you’ve got, essentially, two options. To begin with, you can simply invoke the php ‘echo’ routine, by doing something like this:

Now, if you wanna keep your code really clean, you can rely on CodeIgniter built in parser. How do you implement it?… super simple…:

1. Initialize the Parser Library:

2. Replace the ‘<?php echo $blog_title; ?>’ routines with the following syntax:

So far so good. Now… here’s something interesting. What happens if you wanna print an object’s property? or an object’s method?. Well, CodeIgniter doesn’t support that scenario. It will only work with strings, and with arrays (of strings). So… i’ve extended a bit the library, in order to support ‘printing object’s properties’.

You can download right here my extended version of the parser. We won’t be analyzing the code i’ve written. It’s not complex, and you’re invited to run a diff between the original, and my patch.

Now… how do we use it?. Simple…

1. Install the sf_parser library

You should copy the ‘sf_parser.php’ file to ‘/application/libraries/sf_parser.php’. That’s it. No more no less. Simplicity is one of the things i love the most about CI framework.

2. Initialize the sf_parser library

Instead of initializing the CI’s default parser, we’re gonna need to load our custom library. We can achieve that by doing the following:

3. Use the new syntax!

The goal of this library is to enable you (the user!) to print any object’s properties, or getter’s results. Which means that… instead of using the following syntax, in your view.php file:

You can now do something far more elegant… which looks something like this:

If you found it useful… if you found a bug… or if you’ve extended it further, i’d love to hear from you!

MongoDB is a NoSQL database, free of charge. The beauty of mongo relies on its schema-less design… you can add and remove fields, without doing ‘alter table’.

Your information gets stored in JSON, which is  seriously interesting, specially if you work with iOS / Android Apps, and the communications layer works in json.

So.. fire up a browser, and head to this urls. Assuming you’re running OSX (like me!), you’d need the mac binary, which is about 60 megabytes.

Preferrably, you’ll need to download the 64 bits executable. The 32 bits version can address only databases up to 2 gigabytes.

Once you’ve got the file, simply double click on it, to get it uncompressed. Assuming that the file is in the downloads folder, let’s move it to a more suitable location.

Launch terminal, and type the following:

Mongo stores its databases in the “/data/db” directory, so… we’d need to create them:

Now, let’s add a couple symbolic links, so you can launch mongo from anywhere in the system:

That’s it! you’ve just installed mongo!. In order to launch the database, you simply need to type the ‘mongodb’ command.

If you wanna launch a command-line client, type ‘mongo’, which should connect to the server, right away.