Technical Insights

Western Digital Drive with Leopard - File system formatter failed.

I just bought a 1TB Western Digital drive. I am stoked.

However, I tried to format the drive on my Mac (Leopard) and got the error “File system formatter failed” when I tried to format …

Executing multiple curl requests in parallel with PHP and curl_multi_exec

Let’s get one thing out in the open. Curl is sweet. It does it’s job very well, and I’m absoutely thrilled it exists.

If you’re using curl in your PHP app to make web …

External Libraries in XCode

• c++
• mysql
• xcode

I need to compile something and use the MySQL C++ library. I have mysql and mysql++ already compiled, I won’t go over how to do that now.

I added the following code to the top …

Tool for Testing API's on a Mac

• api testing
• mac

I wasn’t able to find anything that I liked. I basically wanted a front end for curl with bookmarks.

Check out my cleverly named Api Tester. No docs yet, but I hope …

Unsubscribing from ebay emails is insane

Ebay deserves a lot of credit for building a massive system that never seems to be down. Great. But you know what? That doesn’t excuse them for creating some really stupid interfaces or being …

Getting phpsh to work on a mac

I had an issue getting phpsh to work on my mac - I kept getting the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File “./phpsh”, line 20, in import readline

OK, seems easy enough. …

ob_start() causes phpsh to hang, sort of

If you manually call ob_start() at the beginning of your script, you might notice that you are unable to use phpsh. By commenting it out, I was able to fix the issue.

I don’t think it …

Regex Coach Mac Substitute

For a while I had to use a Windows box for my development. Fortunately, I was able to make a good case for my company to switch me to a MacBook Pro.

One of the tools that took me a while to track …

'PHP: An Array of Months'

I’ll be honest, this isn’t very useful. The goal was to have an array of months in the least amount of code.

for($i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++) $months[$i] = date('F', …