To Remember Password or Not

Firefox has a neat feature, it is when you enter your username & password in a web site's sign in form for first time, it will ask you to choose from 3 options, "Never remember password for this site" / "Remember" / "Not now". Once for quite a long time I'd choose "Remember" since I don't need to type my password for returning visit, it's really a saving of time.

BUT, after I begin to use a new computer, I found that I forgot most passwords I let Firefox to remember. And to get my password back is a big waste of time, I need to check e-mail box for password recovery instructions, and some of the mails sent from various web sites are just blocked by mail hosting servers, damn!

So now I'd like to choose "Never for this site" for most situations, because:

1, Type passwords could be good exercise for my fingers.

2, When I don't need to sign in, then I can get a life, it's much much better than surfing, I think I really really need to get a life.

So how about you?

KDE 4 on Mac OS X without X11

"They may not work. They may not even install. They may make your monitor explode in a shower of glass. EVEN LCDs! They may make your children grow horns, and cause the people in your neighborhood to explode spontaneously while doing the Macarena. They will rip out your eyeballs, and eat your soul with a really dull spoon, laughing and cackling while forcing Cheerios up your nose. They will make your intestines explode in a rain of confetti, while evil clowns bite your feet."

The above disclaimer is found on KDE 4 Alpha builds for Mac OS X page, the green dinosaur is attractive since it is so *powerful* ;-)

Good news is that you don't need X11 to run KDE 4 on Mac OS X or Windows, which means a lot open source software built on QT will come to Mac OS X and Windows in __native__ form, isn't that cool?

PHP 5 Support in Mac OS X Tiger Server

Yesterday I just got Mac OS X Tiger Server installed on my PowerMac G5. After several hours exploring, I'd say it's really a dream OS for web developers like me. Apple has made a lot beautiful and useful GUI tools for open source software like Apache web server, with these GUI tools even veteran Unix gurus can save a lot time on configurations & monitoring. For example I really really like the sleek Apache monitoring graph, it's a bit like what you may have ever seen in Zeus, right?



But soon I found that its out-of-box PHP support is still 4.x, hmm not so good, my own application in development needs at least PHP 5.0, so I tried to add PHP 5 support to Mac OS X Tiger Server's httpd 1.3.

According to the manual pages of Tiger Server, Apache 2.0 is shipped with the OS but just for evaluation purpose, and the beautiful monitoring graph tools seem to be only for httpd 1.3, so I grabbed the latest PHP 5.1.6 source tarball from php.net and created a simple configuration script for it:

./configure --prefix=/opt/local/php-5.1 --with-apxs --with-zlib --with-xml --with-gettext=/opt/local --with-gd --with-jpeg-dir=/opt/local --with-png-dir=/opt/local --with-mcrypt=/opt/local --with-mysql=/usr --with-mysqli --with-pdo-mysql=/usr --with-freetype-dir=/opt/local --enable-mbstring --enable-sockets --enable-gd-native-ttf --enable-calendar --enable-soap --enable-shmop --enable-cli --enable-bcmath --enable-dba --with-inifile --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-sqlite-utf8 --enable-wddx

You may ask what is /opt/local stuff? It's the location of packages installed by MacPorts, which is the best way to install open source software under Mac OS X.

Run this script and then make & sudo make install, you'll get PHP 5 support in Mac OS X Tiger Server.

I tried to compile PHP with MySQL 5.1.11 downloaded from MySQL Developer Zone, but it failed with a lot error messages. So I chose to use the shipped version which is installed under /usr.

V2EX! Encore!

Hmmm, finally I've got a new blog in Blogger, again.

So, what is the name V2EX stands for?

It is "way too extreme" and "way to explore", all about my life attitude and things I'd love to do.

Oh I just found that I don't need to have a title for my post in Blogger by default, such simplicity really makes me smile.