Pixelhum

So on Thursday 24th June I decided to go and join the queue for the iPhone 4. Thankfully I was early enough and, after waiting for about 3 and a half hours they finally let me into the o2 shop to buy one.

I recently had to install PostgreSQL on Snow Leopard with PHP support for development. It took some fiddling and a re-install when I screwed up a dependency but I eventually managed to do it! I thought I’d document the process here for anybody else in the same boat.

Anybody that uses Terminal.app on Mac OS to regularly connect to Linux servers — particularly those that use screen — will be aware of the issues with backspace. The following terminal one liner seems to resolve the issues:

$ defaults write com.apple.Terminal TermCapString xterm

I’ve just moved this website over to a Linode VPS. The experience so far has been brilliant. The Linode control panel is excellent and provides all the facilities you could possibly need. I’d decided to move from shared hosting as I felt I was beginning to outgrow it. I needed more flexibility and what better way to get that flexibility than with a virtual machine!

Add the following to the end of your ~/.bashrc file and you’ll always be in a screen session when you SSH into your box.

#======================================================================
# Auto-screen invocation. see: http://taint.org/wk/RemoteLoginAutoScreen
# if we're coming from a remote SSH connection, in an interactive session
# then automatically put us into a screen(1) session.   Only try once
# -- if $STARTED_SCREEN is set, don't try it again, to avoid looping
# if screen fails for some reason.
if [ "$PS1" != "" -a "${STARTED_SCREEN:-x}" = x -a "${SSH_TTY:-x}" != x ]
then
    STARTED_SCREEN=1 ; export STARTED_SCREEN
    [ -d $HOME/lib/screen-logs ] || mkdir -p $HOME/lib/screen-logs
    sleep 1
    screen -x && clear && exit 0
    if [ "$?" != "0" ]; then
        screen && clear && exit 0
    fi
    # normally, execution of this rc script ends here...
    echo "Screen failed! continuing with normal bash startup"
fi
# [end of auto-screen snippet]
# ======================================================================

Replace screen with byobu if you use that.

Remember to use ^a-d to disconnect from your SSH session.