Remove Comcast/Xfinity start page from Firefox (Mac)

by Ryan Parman • July 7, 2011 • Tutorials • 14 comments

The Comcast/Xfinity installer adds crap to your Mac, including forcibly setting an Xfinity portal as the homepage. It’s a really douchey thing to do. I set up my new Comcast Xfinity internet service today using the self-install kit. After walking through the necessary questions, it then forced me to download and install their crap-ware onto [...]

Searching through the AWS SDK for PHP documentation

by Ryan Parman • February 27, 2011 • Projects, Tutorials • 1 comments

Although the AWS SDK for PHP is growing as fast as Amazon’s breadth of web services, it should still be easy to find the information that you need in order to develop. This is a goal that I take very seriously. Back in 2005, I took a job with Stryker Endoscopy as a member of [...]

Creating iPhone ringtones with iTunes and QuickTime

by Ryan Parman • January 8, 2011 • Tutorials • 1 comments

You can either spend money on iPhone ringtones on the iTunes Store, purchase an application that makes them for you, or you can make your own for free. I make all of my own ringtones from music that I already own. There are a few steps involved here, but overall, the process is pretty straightforward. [...]

Installing PHP 5.3 with mysqlnd on Mac OS X with MacPorts

by Ryan Parman • July 11, 2009 • Code, Software, Tutorials • 11 comments

Historically, I’ve always preferred to use Apple’s built-in Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.x that comes with Leopard. However, after trying to compile PHP 5.3 from scratch and connect it with Apache, I decided to just use the MacPorts installer instead. That did mean giving up control of a finely-tuned Apache installation, but in the end, I think I’ve ended up with a better localhost system.

Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VirtualBox on Mac OS X

by Ryan Parman • June 30, 2009 • Software, Tutorials • 1 comments

These days I’m looking to save money anywhere I can. How about you? Whereas VMWare Fusion (as awesome as it is) runs around $80 USD per copy, Sun’s VirtualBox is a free, open-source product for virtualization that runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

If you’ve not yet read the related post, “Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X,” you should. This is a follow up on how to take those virtual machines (which we’ve already done a lot of work on), and convert them for use VirtualBox.

Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMware Fusion on Mac OS X

by Ryan Parman • January 7, 2009 • Browsers, Software, Tutorials • 24 comments

By now, most front-end web developers have heard of the Standalone Internet Explorers (Wikipedia article). Although these are incredibly useful, they’ve always been hacky at best.

Because of that, we need to go the long way. We’ll download the “officially sanctioned” VirtualPC images containing a time-limited version of Windows XP SP3 and Internet Explorer 6.0, and then we’ll convert these images to the kind that work with VMware Fusion (which works on Mac OS X). This should only need to be done every 3 or 4 months when the images expire.

Installing FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP in Fedora 8 running on Amazon EC2

by Ryan Parman • June 28, 2008 • Code, Software, Tutorials • 4 comments

I’ve spent a bit of time working with Amazon EC2 recently. One of the things I’ve been working on is getting a stable build of FFMPEG and FFMPEG-PHP running on a Fedora 8 image in Amazon EC2. This is essentially going to be a tutorial to get things up and running. Of course, your milage [...]

The proper way to blow your nose

by Ryan Parman • April 22, 2006 • Tutorials • 2 comments

I’ve had a head cold for the last 3 days (which is why some of you haven’t seen me online), and in that time I’ve gone through 5 rolls of toilet paper due to blowing my nose. I’ve tried various medicines, and although Sudafed was able to slow the drip, I’ve been blowing my nose [...]