Starting on the 31st August, I’ll be jumping in the car and driving from the North of Australia, all the way down to the bottom of the continent (Melbourne).

This has been something I’ve been talking about doing for the last year or two. This is the real deal, I’m moving to Melbourne!

Subscribe to the RSS feed and keep an eye on my progress! Cya back here on 31st August!

There were rumours going around the office that I dropped my new iPhone into a fresh cup of coffee.. These allegations are completely _untrue. _But I figured it would be a great experiment to try out.

The experiment is, to see how big the splash would be if an iPhone went diving into coffee. [Apple start reading here] Or, alternatively how the slippery back of the iPhone is unsuitable for resting on a laptop that resides on an inclined stand.

Recipe for disaster:

• 1 x brand spankin’ new iPhone 3GS
• 1 x Griffin laptop stand
• 1 x Cup of freshly brewed PIAZZA D’ORO — Dolce Vita Coffee Here’s the experiment..
  First place the new iPhone on the inclined laptop surface. Then, place the full cup of coffee under the laptop stand so as to encourage the biggest splash!

Here’s what it would have looked like (using Abhi’s iPhone 3G) ..

And this is the amount of coffee that would need to be sponged up after the experiment.

And the result.. A nice big mess to clean up! N.B: no iPhones were harmed during this experiment.

On the long weekend (Cairns Show Holiday) of 17th July - 19 July 2009 ten of us (and 15 motorbikes!) went up to a secret location near Lake Barinne for a weekend of camping and motorbike riding.

Check out all the photos on Flickr: Camping + Trials near Lake Barrine

Same attempt from a different angle:

By far the best musical discovery for me, so far this year is Phoenix. The french group dropped their latest album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix in February this year and it peaked at #13 on the Australian album charts.

Here is an unplugged version of Lisztomania by Phoenix.

Here is the Brat Pack Mashup, which the band seems to fancy more than their original “expensive” version.

My new iPhone 3Gs 16GB is ordered and en route from Vodafone Australia.

My preference is towards the $69 plan (with 1GB data) from Vodafone over the Virgin $70 equivalent plan.

Vodafone is also the first Australian telecom provider to offer visual voicemail and is currently performing a $500M major national network upgrade to regional areas of Australia.

Virgin mobile operates on the Optus network which suffered major network outages on the east coast of Australia for several consecutive hours during August of last year.

A new project that I’m currently working on is SHRT.TW. This one I’m keeping pretty quiet for now.. If you are a web/application developer or a mac user expect shrt.tw to be an integral part of your daily workflow. Check back over the next few weeks for updates on the status of this one.

UPDATED — shrt.tw has been replaced by Medium Stack

A witty ad featuring Rhys Darby ( played characters in flight of the concords [band manager] and [bank manager from the movie] Yes Man! ) a quirky fellow endorsing New Zealand’s phone company 2 degrees.

I was setting up my local PHP/MySQL development environment on my local MacBook Pro to mirror our work development setup.

I ran into the following error:

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`**Warning** on line 365 of include/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php
mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]:
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock'
(2)`

I have fixed this issue in the past on a previous Leopard install, so I thought it was the perfect candidate for a blog post.

Customise php.ini file to use custom MySQL socket

If you have made manual customisations to your php config file already, skip this part; otherwise run the following in Terminal.app:

sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

Next, open Sequel Pro and connect to the mysql server on your local Mac. If you don’t know how to do this, take a look at Getting Connected on the Sequel Pro documentation page.

Then, choose _Database > Show Server Variables… _

Scroll down through the list of variables until you get to socket.

Open up /etc/php.ini in Textmate or Coda and scroll down the where it says:

; Default socket name for local MySQL connects.  If empty, uses the built-in ; MySQL defaults. mysql.default_socket =

Change the mysql.default_socket line to read:

mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

Restart Web Sharing Service (Apache)

Now, restart your Web Sharing service by going to  > System Preferences…

Choose Sharing from the System Preferences page.

On the sharing pane, uncheck Web Sharing, wait a second for it to do its thing, then recheck it. If it was already unchecked, you will just need to choose the checkbox once.

Now, just reload your php page in Safari, and it should hopefully just work. Your app should now be connecting to the local MySQL server on your Mac. Enjoy!

The amazing artist, John Martz did this piece recently for the website Momentile. You can read about the story/process behind his work at his blog.

Click on the image to see the hi-res version on Flickr.

Here is some hilarious stand-up content from comedian Jim Breuer:

And another, with Metallica: