I’ve recently ordered a new computer and like with all things when they are new you gotta check them out for faults. Screens are always a worry, so with this in mind I’ve knocked together a little tool that simply allows you to check the display for various little things.

The tool is set out in two phases, the first phase consists of the tones white, black, light gray, gray, and dark gray. These will let you spot the easy pixels, gray is nice as you’ll be able to see if the panel is evenly lit. The second phase is just an RGB test, cycles red, green, blue, yellow and magenta. This will show any pixels that are stuck in those main colours.

It’s pretty simple and a tiny download written in Java so you’ll need Java installed. Mac OS X users have the Java system by default, Windows users will need it, thats if you don’t have it already, most people do. There is a Read Me included in the download with full instructions.

Any problems / help, or if you have something to say let me know.

I have written about Streamripper before (removed the older post as is was out of date), it’s an interesting little application that I use now and then. I originally wrote about compiling it back on OS 10.5 Leopard, at that time the current version was a bit busted but in the end I got it to work and posted the details here. Times have changed and software changes so I thought I would update the world on my use of Streamripper. After all the messing about I had with the 1.62.x range of Streamripper I had settled on using 1.61.27 with security patches. I used this for quite a while, last year I thought I would checkout the newer versions of Streamripper and found that they had taken the great little tool and added a whole bunch of stuff that had a dependency on the glib2 library, which is massive when you just want a single little tool. I suppose it’s ok if you are running on a Linux box where you have glib2 installed as it gets used by lots of applications, but on other platforms it’s just overkill and I can’t be bothered with it.

With this I mind I got the source code for the last of the standalone versions 1.62.3, it does everything, and doesn’t have a massive dependency problem like the recent versions. I made a small change to the source, compiled it and life is good again, much easier than compiling for 10.5 and all that bag of hurt of the older versions :)

The reason I have suddenly posted this is I have just re-compiled Streamripper for Snow Leopard using the new Clang and LLVM-GCC compilers. As all of Snow Leopards utils are in x86-64 I did Streamripper as x86-64, a few years back I never thought I’d be compiling Streamripper as 64-Bit just seems overkill, but why not :)

I won’t bother with all the building stuff like my last post on the subject as it’s not that hard really.

Enjoy!

On Mac OS X 10.5 the default compiler is GCC 4.0.1, Apple does provide GCC 4.2.1 as part of the XCode Developer Tools releases for 10.5 but it isn’t setup as the default.

The main tools are located in /usr/bin. In this folder you will find both gcc 4.0 and 4.2 along with g++ 4.0 and 4.2. The commands gcc, g++, cc, and gcov are all symbolic links to the default 4.0 versions. To make 4.2 the default we just need to modify the symbolic links.

To do this we need to go in to the Terminal and issue the following commands:

Now you should have a complete working gcc 4.2.1 tool chain. If there is a problem you can verify the symbolic links are pointing at the correct targets by typing ls -l Hope this helps someone else.

Thought this might be a useful addition to my other post “Installing MySQL on Mac OS X”

To start off go and get the latest version of MySQL. Hopefully you have downloaded a nice diskimage (.dmg) this should contain the startup item install package (.pkg) and the MySQL package (.pkg) there is normally also a control panel in the diskimage. I don’t use the startup item as I like to just turn on MySQL when I want it.

Ok make sure MySQL is off, if you have MySQL installed and the control pannel just go to ‘System Preferences’ and click the MySQL icon and hit the ‘Stop MySQL button. Ok Install the the MySQL package, this will install MySQL in the directory /usr/local/ . Sorry but this bit need the terminal people so open it up. Do the following :

I wrote this of the top of my head so let me know if you have a problem.

First download the right MySQL installer .pkg from the MySQL site. This should mount as a disk image on the desktop. Double click and install the package, then double click the Mysql.prefpane and it will offer you two choices : Install for all users or install for current user. Select which you want then load up the terminal.

In the terminal type the following :

At this stage you close the terminal window and open a new one and do the following :

You should get some thing like “Welcome to MySQL” type thing at this point, that means it’s all fine and working. Type q to quit the montior. Next we need to setup the root password for MySQL by doing the following:

Thats it you should be done, to control the system and add users check the documentation or you can use things like the MySQL administrator app or phpMyAdmin, there is plenty of bits out there.

Tested using Mac OS X 10.4.5 and MySQL 5.0.18