I Don't Like Macs and They Don't Like Me

Ever get the feeling that an operating system just has it out for you? Every time I use a mac I just think that the thing is trying to butt heads with me. Macs also have a tendency to burn up around me. It's true, in the past month, 3 mac laptops at work have fried. Scary stuff.

Today I was trying to install MODx on a mac OS X server, and I just had a hell of a time getting it to work. In fact, it still doesn't work. I scoured the Mac friendly MODx forums for a hint of anyone else with issues but all I could find were posts about how people switched to Macs and just love them. Puke.

Apparently, no one else has server issues on a Mac like I do, and they are really bad ones. Here are the issues I encountered

MODx related:

• Files don't get included
• Some AJAX stuff is just broken because data is returned with extra spaces at the front of it???
• Caching doesn't work
• Errors in the document parser class

Server Setup Related:

• Apache is just all different than in a LAMP setup so I spent quite a while just trying to find things like httpd.conf
• PHP was set up to log errors, but hell if I know where it was logging them to (log_errors was set to on, but error_log was set to nothing). I set the error_log to a location, and created the file, but it took me a while to figure out that the file needed to be in the same group as apache so that it could write to it
• MySQL had socket connection errors, this is because apple decided to change the default location of mysql.sock from /var/mysql/ to /private/tmp/. Idiots.

I guess that is my biggest problem with the way the OS is set up on a Mac. Its like Linux, but they've changed the location of everything just enough to piss you off. This is one of the reasons why I switched to a PC when OS X first came out. I'd been a die hard Mac user for about 10 years, but it was just so frustrating to try to get used to the way the screwed up Linux. That and the whole File Browser, which just doesn't jive with me. And the way they smell. Yuck.

Anyway, I probably should have prefaced this post with, I didn't set up this server myself, so I'm dealing with someone else's first try. And it's cool if you like macs, I have tons of friends who are mac users, but that doesn't mean that Macs don't hate me, and that I don't hate them.