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Midwestern Mac, LLC

Below, you can read through the latest blog posts from Midwestern Mac, LLC. We blog about Macs, Drupal, web development, app development for the Mac and the iPhone, and whatever else suits our fancy!

Installing Drush on Mac OS X "Snow Leopard"

Submitted by Jeff Geerling on September 24, 2010 - 10:36am

To those wishing to install Drush on their Mac, but having difficulty, here's a surefire way to get it running great:

[Edit: Umm... instead of doing all the steps below, you can use Homebrew (the 'missing package manager for Mac OS X') and enter $ brew install drush. Much simpler!]

  1. Fire up the Terminal (this is why you're using Drush, so you'd better get comfy in here!).
  2. cd to your Desktop, download drush, and extract it.
    $ cd Desktop $ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drush-6.x-3.3.tar.gz $ tar -xvzf drush-6.x-3.3.tar.gz
  3. Move the drush directory to /usr/local/lib
    $ sudo mv drush /usr/local/lib
  4. Make drush executable.
    $ sudo chmod u+x /usr/local/lib/drush/drush
  5. Make a symbolic link to drush in /usr/bin
    $ sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/drush/drush /usr/bin/drush
  6. Set up an alias in your bash environment so you can type 'drush command' rather than '/usr/bin/drush command'
    $ cd ~
    $ nano .profile
    # Inside the .profile file:
    alias drush='/usr/bin/drush'
    # Then press control-O + return to write the file, and control-X to exit nano
    $ source .profile

Now, you can simply enter 'drush command' to use drush.

Allowing anonymous IP-based access to content with Boost, subscription model

Submitted by Jeff Geerling on September 22, 2010 - 4:05pm

On the St. Louis Review website (case study here), which offers much of its content based on a subscription model (you must be a subscriber to access the 'premium' content), we wanted to allow those inside our network access to nodes that were marked 'subscribers-only', without having to log in to the website and maintain a user account. Here's how we did it:

1 - Modification of Custom Subscriber Access Code

Our site uses hook_nodeapi() to limit access to 'premium' or 'subscribers-only' content. We simply added in a check to see if users were coming from a certain IP address (the IP address for our corporate network):

"Licensing for this product has stopped working" - Adobe CS3/CS4 on a Mac

Submitted by Jeff Geerling on September 19, 2010 - 1:48pm

Recently, I had to recover my iMac from a Time Machine backup and a hard drive replacement (my old drive flaked out—see how I repaired my hard drive here (video included!)).

Upon trying to open any Adobe Creative Suite 3 app (I use Photoshop and Illustrator daily...), I got the following error window:

Adobe Illustrator - Licensing for this product has stopped working

I was taken to this Adobe Support page, which suggests a variety of options for fixing the problem—all of which didn't work for me.

The solution, it turns out, was for me to simply delete the entire folder "FLEXNet Publisher" folder at the following location: /[startup disk]/Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher.

After I deleted that folder, I opened Adobe Illustrator, and it took me through the activation process (it had save my license key, so all I had to do was click 'Next' until the app was working again).

How to Repair Your Intel iMac — DIY Guide from Lifeisaprayer.com

Submitted by Jeff Geerling on September 16, 2010 - 11:52pm

Over on Lifeisaprayer.com, I posted a detailed tutorial/guide on how to replace the hard drive inside a 24" Intel iMac with an aluminum enclosure (the process is similar on other aluminum iMacs). It's a rather intricate process, so in addition to a few illustrations, I posted a video of the process on YouTube (it's embedded over on Lifeisaprayer.com as well!).

Intel iMac Teardown and Hard Drive Replacement - DIY/Guide

 

iMac - Intel - Guts exposed

Have fun repairing your iMac! (Please be sure to leave comments on the Lifeisaprayer.com post, and not here).

Druplicon Golf Ball (DrupliGolf)

Submitted by Jeff Geerling on September 7, 2010 - 10:21am

After having seen DrupliBacon and DrupliCake (there are other great adaptations of the Druplicon as well!), I decided I wanted to get some creative juices flowing this weekend. I present, DrupliGolf!

DrupliGolf - Druplicon on a Golf Ball

Drupligolf is the result of a round of golf, an addiction to Drupal, and a love for the best OSS mascot in existence. (The latter reason will definitely strike a chord with anybody who's shared a drink with the Druplicon in #drupal... and actually drank).

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