There are two options for installing MySQL on OS X, assuming you aren't running OS X Server which includes MySQL. The first option is to install it from source. The second option is to install it from a package. I've installed MySQL from source before and it is not a terribly difficult process, but for some unknown reason (perhaps related to my incorrigible tendencies towards sloth) I had a strong preference for installing it from the package.

The problem was that the current MySQL package isn't exactly compatible with OS X Leopard. I found a solution to that problem in this post on The Blog that Noone Reads. As suggested there, changing the owner of all of the files and folders found in /usr/local/mysql/data fixed the problems I had with MySQL after installing it from the package. Almost. Every time I rebooted MySQL would refuse to start from the prefpane. It turned out that there was a log file whose ownership was getting reset every time I restarted. The fix for that was to leave the ownership on that file alone and to change its permissions instead. Remember to change <computer name> to the computer name of your Mac before running the following command:

    sudo chmod a+rw /usr/local/mysql/data/<computer name>.local.err

After changing the permissions of that log file I am able to start and stop MySQL from the prefpane even after rebooting.

There is still one problem left to solve – I cannot get MySQL to automatically start. But as usual I decided to declare victory at the 90% success mark and leave a bit of the problem unsolved to satisfy the procrastinator in me. Besides, I didn't want MySQL to start automatically anyway.

After nearly a year of faithful service my MacBook developed the dreaded WiFi connection dropping syndrome. It started happening shortly after upgrading from my old faithful Linksys WRT54GL to a shiny new D-Link DIR-655. At first it happened sporadically, but gradually the condition worsened until the connection was sometimes dropping within a couple minutes of being connected and sometimes even less. I tried every fix I could find on the Internet short of downgrading to Tiger from Leopard. In the end the only thing that worked for me was turning off 802.11n in the router and restricting it to 802.11g only.

I am not too unhappy about losing 802.11n. But I bought the DIR-655 primarily to upgrade my home office to Gigabit Ethernet so getting 802.11n was really just a bonus feature. Even so, I am still hoping that the impending release of OS X 10.5.2 fixes the problem so that I can turn 802.11n back on.

Open Mail.app preferences and select the account you want to add an alias to. In Account Information there is an edit box for Email Address. Add a comma and then the alias you want to add to the Email Address. You can add as many aliases as you want as long as you separate each with a comma.

When sending or replying to an email message Mail.app will let you choose the From address from a drop down list of all of the aliases on that account. When you send a new message it will default to the first email address in the Email Address alias list. But when responding to an email message Mail.app will try to match the To address from the original message to one of your aliases and it will use that alias if can find a match.

I cursed Apple and Google every time I searched for an email and got a list of possible matches that was twice as long as it needed to be. But then I hit upon a simple, if imperfect, solution – just exclude the “All Mail” folder from Spotlight searches! Open Spotlight's preferences and add the folder All Mail.imapmbox to the exclusion list on the Privacy page. The folder path will be something like this:

    ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-<user>@<domain>@imap.gmail.com/[Gmail]

This makes a huge improvement but any email messages that have multiple tags in Google can still show up as duplicates in a Spotlight search. Most of my messages only have a single Google tag so it rarely annoys me. If it does get to be an annoyance I can no longer tolerate then I have another potential solution – exclude all of the Gmail mailboxes except All Mail.imapmbox. This would be more work and I would have to update the Spotlight filter every time I add a new tag. But it would ensure that every Gmail message would only be indexed once by Spotlight.