Mac troubles.

I went round a friends house on Tuesday night to teach them how to manage the church’s website which runs under Mambo (which I’m starting to regret installing!). Unfortunately this person only has mac’s in the house and doesn’t really know much about the technical side of a mac apart from using word, email and graphical/music packages. He wanted to install a copy of mambo onto his own mac so he could play without distrupting the live server. However mambo needs mysql, php and apache installed. Thankfully apache was already configured but php wasn’t working – it was just displaying the files as text files. However when I searched for httpd.conf it didn’t come back with any details – instead I had to open terminal, change to a directory in /etc and then vi the file – only to find it was readonly, owned by root and when I asked for the root password I was met with a blank stare. I then used netinfo (i think) to remove the asterix in the passwd file for root, changed the password, logged in, edited the httpd.conf and hey presto – php was working. Undo the root passwd setups and then onto mambo installation.
This worked ok until we got to the sql installation as although mysql was installed, we couldn’t find a frontend to configure the databases and couldn’t find anything in google…I thought Mac interfaces were meant to be really helpful and friendly? This one certainly wasn’t.

Anyway, we carried on with testing on the “live” site and discovered that we needed a way of uploading files, specifically mp3 files, to the mambo server but you can only seem to do this if you are the administrator of the server. Not much use for giving users the ability to upload certain files and pictures.
The next solution was to use ftp, so does anyone know a good, easy to use (gui), free, mac ftp client?
Alternatively anyone got any alternatives to running a cms website that allows registered users to upload files (like a blog). I might just start again with an installation of WordPress – might be easier.

Animal Airlines respond

After my post about Animal Airlines being a bunch of cowboys I get the following amusing email from them. Spelling mistakes left untouched 🙂

DEAR MR/MRS. HELSBY – YOU REALLY ARE DEARS,
WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS – FOR JOINING OUR ‘COMPLAINTS CLUB’ – I AM SURE YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST MEMBERS IN OVER 40 YEARS. HOWEVER, DON’T GET TOO EXCITED BECAUSE,SADLEY, YOU WILL BE DISSAPOINTED TO HEAR THAT WE SIMPLY CAN’T FIND ANY OTHERS WILLING TO JOIN YOU BOTH. BUT HOLD-ON IN THERE, LETS SEE WHAT THE NEXT 40 YEARS BRINGS – YOU NEVER KNOW!
AS YOU ARE BOTH THE VERY ‘FIRST’ MEMBERS TO THE CLUB WE HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE YOU ‘HONARY LIFE MEMBERS’ AND I HOPE YOU WILL BOTH ACCEPT THIS INVITATION IN THE SPIRIT IT IS INTENDED.
BON VOYAGE,
TONY

Manually removing Google Desktop

From the email that google sent me, here is how to remove Google Desktop by hand:-
Thank you for your note. If you’re unable to uninstall Google Desktop
Search through Add/Remove Programs and/or “Start” > “Programs” > “Google
Desktop Search” > “Uninstall Google Desktop Search,” you can remove it
manually. To do so, edit the Windows system registry and then delete the
appropriate program files. Here’s how:

TO EDIT THE WINDOWS SYSTEM REGISTRY:
Note: editing the Windows registry is an advanced process. You may prefer
to contact your system administrator.

That said, you should be able to solve the problem by deleting the
following registry keys:

– Hkey_Current_User\Software\Google\Google Desktop
– Hkey_Local_Machine\\Software\\Google\\Desktop\\InstalledNTUserName
– Hkey_Local_Machine\\Software\\Google\\Desktop\\InstalledUserSID

Restart your computer so this change can take effect, and then remove the
program files for Desktop Search. Here’s how:

TO REMOVE GOOGLE DESKTOP SEARCH:
Open C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME-THAT-NO-LONGER-EXISTS\Local
Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search. Delete all the
files in this directory.

If you need further assistance, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team

Uninstalling Google Desktop Search as another user is not possible.

Apparently you can’t uninstall the desktop search if you installed it as another user as you get the error message “Google Desktop Search was installed on this machine by a different user, DOMAIN\Username. To uninstall Google Desktop Search logon as that user” This is not necessarily possible if the domain doesn’t exist anymore (and therefore you CANT log on as that user)
The funny thing is that if you enter the error message into Google it asks if you meant login and not logon. (and there are no results for either of the two options.
I’ve logged an error report with Google, so we’ll see how long it takes for some action on this.

Update Working instructions on How to manually uninstall Google Desktop are posted here.