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Thursday, July 9 2015

How to use older scanners in Mac OS X 10.10

By Kim Gammelgaard on Thursday, July 9 2015, 21:06

I have been using Vuescan from Hamrick.com for a long time, and am a happy camper. My old Canoscan 8600f works perfectly with this, but sometimes I want to use other programs for the scanner, like Paperless from Mariner Software to scan my receipts. It uses the native drivers, though, and the driver for Canon Canoscan 8600f has not been updated since Mac OS X 10.7.

I have tried to install different versions of the Canon drivers, but so far I had not had any luck. Today I found the solution, though: Jan Egil's Twain fixer It works out of the box, probably after installing the old scanner driver. Now, the scanner pops up, when I add it in System Preferences->Printers and Scanners, and it now works perfectly for scanning my stack of receipts! - Thanks Jan Egil!

Saturday, October 18 2014

Postgres.app, PHP and Yosemite

By Kim Gammelgaard on Saturday, October 18 2014, 08:25

After upgrading to Mac OS X Yosemite, the connection to my Postgres-DB from PHP failed again. Funny that Apple puts Postgres on their OS X Server, but don’t compile PHP (on their normal edition) so you can use it.

The help was like last time:

Using this guide:

http://coolestguidesontheplanet.com/upgrade-to-php-5-4-or-5-5-mac-osx-10-8-mountain-lion/

I found this:

curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.4

but decided to go for php 5.5 (I could probably have gone 5.6 by now, but I was at 5.5 before and I didn’t want to break a thing that just works), so I change it to :

curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.5

And my site was up running again in less than 5 minutes!

There was a warning that 5.5.17 which I got, had not been tested with Yosemite, but it seems to work for me.

Tuesday, October 22 2013

Postgres.app, PHP and Mavericks

By Kim Gammelgaard on Tuesday, October 22 2013, 17:21

Update 10 November 2013: after updating Mavericks from GM to build 13A603, everything broke again. After recompiling like specified below nothing was working and there may have been a missing path somewhere in the php.ini-file. While tracking the error down, I stumbled over a new version of PHP with a one-line install on http://www.coolestguidesontheplanet.com. I decided on 5.5 while I was at it.:

easy PHP 5.5-installation

Just running the installation command, a curl, the postgres-connection was working again, even from a non-standard postgres-installation. Thumbs up.

--

I updated a few of my computers to Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Everything went fine, or so I thought until my wife complained about a missing blog. I happen to run this blog on Dotclear using a Postgres.app-database. Dotclear is of course using php and Apache.

Soon it was clear that the good folks at Apple have dropped support for Postgres in their php-configuration, so what to do. But I found this rather helpful page:

http://blog.rupey.org/post/63221360055/adding-postgres-support-to-php-on-os-x-mavericks

It was not perfect though, as a few steps were a bit shorthanded: installing autoconf from brew for instance, but that was fairly easy after a bit of googling, so I won’t repeat those steps here. See here, if you like.

I think that Rupey gets it very right for the rest, that is if you have Postgres installed by hand, i.e. that it is comfortably sitting in /usr/local/pgsql/ or similar. Given that I had used the app-version - much simpler to install and run - I had to point the configuration to the right directory. So when doing this

cd ext/pdo_pgsql

phpize

./configure

I ended up with this error:

checking for pg_config... not found

configure: error: Cannot find libpq-fe.h. Please specify correct PostgreSQL installation path

To point out the right installation path I just had to do this:

./configure --with-pdo-pgsql=/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin

before doing the rest:

make

sudo make install

and finally adding extension=pdo_pgsql.so to /etc/php.ini (and changing the time zone) and doing a sudo httpd -k graceful to make php work with Postgres again. Sorry for the downtime, btw.

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