Dear XP
Leave it to the Japanese to have a theme song for a software practices conference.
Fixing MacPort’s MySQL5 install
I had to reinstall OSX the other day as certain applications were crashing with alarming frequency. As I’ve installed DarwinPorts(now called MacPorts) for managing my software development libraries, I reinstalled the usual application via port install app. Now everything went pretty smoothly, Rails, Apache2, Lighttpd, MySQL and PHP4 were all installed without much hassle.
But when I tried to login as root to the MySQL daemon, I kept getting a “Access denied for user ‘root’@'localhost’ (using password: YES)” error message. The odd thing was that I did not set a password for the root account during installation. Some searching on the internet suggested resetting the root password. However, that didn’t work, nor did reinstalling MySQL.
The issue was finally solved after following the suggestion from Abel Lopez from the comments sections of this page in the MySQL documentation. It turns out that the mysql user which owns the processes spawned from MySQL daemon didn’t have enough privileges for the data directory. The workaround was to remove /opt/local/var/db/mysql5/, recreate it and set its ownership via chown mysql:mysql.
After this was done, I re-ran the database install script and sure enough, I was able to login as root and change the password as well.
Geodata in Singapore
I have an idea for a non-commercial web application that involves people and places where these folks can hang out. So I figured that having location maps would be rather useful. However, I’m targeting a very narrow market: people who live in Singapore. Google Maps may have the world mapped out but their maps of Singapore does not go down into the level of detail that I’m looking for.
Looking for help in singapore.rb, I was informed that the more prominent provider of location maps in Singapore, Streetdirectory.com is not at all friendly to having external data consumers make use of its copyrighted geodata. However, approaching can.com.sg and sg.pagenation.com might prove more fruitful. I’ve sent both an email asking whether an API is available for their services. Just gotta wait for their replies then.
Update
That was fast, about 10 minutes after sending the email, I received a reply from Peter Tong of pagenation.com. Unfortunately, pagenation does not currently have an API. Bummer, that leaves screen scraping as a solution. However, he is very accomodating of any and all requests to link to the maps, I love that.
Another Update
The reply from can.com.sg came in about 2 days, it appears that they do not have an API as well as don’t plan to offer it anytime soon. I was referred to Agis Pte Ltd instead. This is the company that supplies map data to can.com.sg, another source to check out, I suppose.
Krugle enters beta
Krugle is a search engine aimed specifically for developers of code. What it provides is a centralised location for finding and browsing source code for projects available in open source.
I have only played around with it for a short time, so I’ll be reserving any judgement for later. Its currently a closed beta, so access is restricted to people who received an access code for account registration.