June 2012

With Google Apps the dots do matter

June 27, 2012

For years the lowly dot in gmail addresses didn't matter. You could be joshua@ and jo.sh.ua@ all the same and your email would reach you. This had some uses when filtering mail in various systems. Though I've not found an announcement of the change and Google is littered with links that say otherwise it appears from testing this morning with several domains that dots or periods, whatever you may call them, do matter but only if you're using Google Apps.

The power of being present

June 18, 2012

Last week while I was traveling I talked to my very upset daughter using FaceTime. I don't know what caused her to be upset only that she was. Within a few minutes she was smiling and talking to me before going to bed and it was great. Tonight I was reminded, however, just how hollow those 'victories' can be. Coming home from daycare she wanted some 'daddy' time. She came into my office and crawled up on my lap. There we sat. She lying on my chest resting her head on my shoulder and me slightly reclined in my office chair. Nothing needed to be said. There was nothing to be done. Just being present. Life is filled with simple things that make us who we are.

Setting up Xdebug with Acquia Dev Desktop for local debugging

June 17, 2012

A while back Robert Douglass had written a great guide to setting up to use Xdebug on Mac OS X. Looking for it today it looks like the sands of time have erased it from the webs. At the same time the recent versions of Dev Desktop include Xdebug so the process is a little different (and simpler).

Settings panel with Edit highlighted

In this case I'm setting up Xdebug to work with Komodo IDE and Dev Desktop that comes bundled with Drupal 7. After installing Dev Desktop and setting up your first site it's time to enable Xdebug. In the recent versions of Dev Desktop it ships with Xdebug but the PHP extension is turned off.

The first step is launching the Dev Desktop control panel. Once it has started click the "Settings..." button in the lower right. Then pick the "Config" tab at the top center to see the server configuration. The screen shot here shows PHP 5.2 but the process is the same for 5.2 or 5.3. Whichever version of PHP click the Edit link beside the php configuration files.

This will open the chosen php.ini file in Text Edit. With the file open look for the line containing xdebug.so. If the installation is in the standard directory it will look something like this: