While working on a local copy of a Drupal site I am helping develop, I ended up hitting the following error:

General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away: SELECT ff.* FROM {filter_format} ff ...

Ugh! Now what?! We need to change a setting on MySQL that ships with MAMP. As it turns out, the default max_allowed_packet is set to 1M and it needs to be higher. Changing that to 100M did the trick for me. Locate your my.cnf file and add the following setting under the [mysqld] section:

It turns out that you can "instruct" syslogd so that it ignores all messages from Solar Service instead of writing them to /var/log/asl. Here's how:

1. Add the following two lines in /private/etc/asl.conf:

# Ignore messages from Logitech's Solar Service.app
? [CS= Sender Solar] ignore

2. Reboot

OR simply restart syslogd by running:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist

Sources where I found all this information:

was playing around osx and figured out how to list all the custom url schemes (from the command-line)...

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister
-dump|egrep "(bindings.*\:$)"|sort

The output is something like this:

The Problem

OSX is fairly secure, however, nothing is impervious to attacks, and following the weakest link theory, the whole system will be as secure as its least secure component. In the recent events relating to the flashback malware, that component is NOT OSX itself, but rather, Java, as this article points out.

The Problem

You, like me once, just upgraded to Xcode 4 and now you can't compile blender... This happens because the blender compiler (BTW: I use scons to compile) uses the old sdk 10.5 and/or 10.4u, which is not available on Xcode 4.

If you need help getting the initial setup to compile blender, view this video done by the awesome people at blender cookie.