With every new release of Mac OS X, the need to re-install Perl's MySQL driver "DBD::mysql" arises again. And every single time it does not work out of the box (i.e. using cpan). Since I'm giving up using Perl and write my new scripts (yes, also the Shell scripts) in PHP, partially because of problems like this, I was able to postpone dealing with this problem, which arised after installing Snow Leopard - up until today.

If you have the problem it is most likely (and has always been) due to wrong paths to MySQL's header files. The fix is simple, and if you google for it people were complaining about the same problem even under OS X 10.2. Here's the solution: Build the thing manually, giving the right paths to Makefile.PL:

I needed to backup the contents of a file sharing directory of a server in our LAN to the shiny new mirrored 1 TB RAID inside my Mac Pro. Having a simple backup is nice, but it's even better to have snapshots, with the possibility to jump back to any date and have the exact representation of the disk as it was back then (TimeMachine also does this pretty well for Macs).

Always creating a complete backup would be a waste of disk space par excellence and in my case - backup via LAN - also pretty hard on the network. Fortunately there is rsync, and there's our friends ssh and launchd. rsync takes advantage of *NIX file system hardlinks and when called with the right arguments only backs up new files since the last backup, pointing to the older copy of a file if the file has not changed in the meantime. Mike Rubel has written up a nice article covering these aspects of rsync, check it out.

For my Eponyms iPhone App I wanted to bless SQLite with the ability to handle special chars - especially German Umlaute - like they should be handled, which e.g. is treating ä like a when sorting. Currently these Umlauts appear after Z, which is not what we want.

This article shows how to get this to work for your SQLite-using iPhone App, implemented as a static library.

This one bugged me a long time, and over the weekend I decided that it's finally time to roll it: I created a simple QuickLook Plugin for CSV files.
The nice thing is - the Finder also uses this Plugin to create the Finder Icons. For speed reasons I decided to limit the display to the first 200 rows maximum, but since this thing is Open Source, you can change that whenever you like. The project website is here: http://code.google.com/p/quicklook-csv/. There you can also find a DMG containing a pre-compiled binary ready to use after download.

Open Source Software is a great thing, however there's always some lunatics out there that want to profit from the work of others. This is exactly what happened to Mathias and me; German guy named Sandro Stricker takes our source and puts it on the App Store as a 1$ app! He does not bother to comply to the license and all he changes is the name (from MedCalc to "X MedCalc"), the Icon, the loading screen and - the copyright and development notices!