Head in the Cloud

I noticed the fans in my Macbook Pro were running excessively.  When looking at Activity Monitor, I noted that the Dock was using 100% of the CPU.  A quick search on Google, and I found the culprit to be Parallels.  The root cause is an issue with the graphics API between OS X 10.6.8 and Parallels Desktop 6.  I had indeed recently updated to 10.6.8 in preparation for Lion. The details can be found in this Parallels KB article: Mac Dock consuming 100% of CPU core after upgrade to Mac OS X 10.6.8 Symptoms: Dock consumes 100% of CPU Environment: Mac OS X 10.6.8 Parallels 6.0.12090 The Solution Rather than downloading from the web site, I simply ran the "Check for Updates" on the Parallels application menu.

Or should I say "unable to install MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X".  My first attempt at installing MySQL on Mac was with MySQL 5.1 on Snow Leopard.  That worked as expected and without any issues.  MySQL 5.5, however, was a bit tricky. After the install, I got this error on start up: 101224  9:50:00 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. MySQL is not started at this point, so running mysql_upgrade also fails (not that there is anything to upgrade, it's a fresh install). Viva la Google!  After a little digging on Google (ok, a lot of digging), I found this article in the MySQL forums: MySQL Forums :: Install :: Unable to install MySQL 5.5.8 on MacOS 10.6 http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?11,399397,399606#msg-399606 Worked like a charm! So, the complete steps: Download the dmg and install per the reference manual:   http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/macosx-installation-pkg.html Edit: /usr/local/mysql/supp...

Well, I did it.  I made the leap from the PC world to Mac.  Not that it was a far leap; I've been using Fedora as my primary OS since 2005.  The decision for me wasn't so much the "Apple sex-appeal" or even the OS, but more the engineering--it was the only i7 laptop I test drove (and I tried many) that didn't cook my wrists and could last an entire 8 hour business trip on battery. Anyway, I thought it would be worth while to start a blog mini-series on my experiences as developer, architect, and business owner with Mac. The new toy: 15" Macbook Pro (April 2010) High-Res Anti-Glare screen Intel Core i7 @ 2.66 GHz 4 GB RAM 500GB 5400RPM Hard Disk Mac OS X 10.6.3 Software: Eclipse 3.6 Netbeans 6.9 Mono 2.6 Monodevelop 2.4 Oracle SQL Developer 2.1 MySQL 5.1 JBoss 5.1 with the Metro Web Services stack Concept Draw Office Open Office 3.2 Subversion Client RapidSVN Ode to Microsoft Windows As most any developer who has left the Windows world w...