Scott Boms

Our November 2007 Back Catalogue

An Accesskey Tip for Safari in Leopard

Believe it or not, I’m in the midst of a not-insignificant design refresh of the blog (no, seriously!) and as part of that I’ve been looking at making some modest accessibility improvements under the hood. Part of that has been adding or improving accesskey support which I quickly discovered has changed in Leopard depending on if you are using the new Spaces feature.

Under normal circumstances accesskeys are triggered by pressing the Control key plus the specific alphanumeric key. If you’ve enabled Spaces, using Control and a numeric key will instead switch spaces, at least by default. Instead you need to use Control-Option plus the number key.

You can change the keyboard settings (use Control, Command, Option or none) from the System Preferences for Spaces to potentially avoid this issue entirely though using Command would conflict with Safari’s bookmark handling features.

On the other hand, using Control and some other alphabetic character should still work as expected and as they did in Tiger if Spaces is not enabled (which is the default in a clean, out of the box Leopard install).

Get the MySQL Ruby Gem working on Leopard

Leopard is out and it’s generally good aside from a few minor hiccups, surprises and unexpected changes deeper down in the OS affecting the Unix core.

One such hiccup is that the native bindings that allow Ruby and MySQL to communicate are a bit harder to get working than in Tiger unless you happened to just go a straight upgrade to Leopard in which case they should still be working.

MySQL’s binaries should install just fine in Leopard, but be sure to stick with version 5.0.37 of the Community Server for the time being. The two newer builds appear to be broken. You can download version 5.0.37 from here: http://downloads.mysql.com/archives.php?p=mysql-5.0&v=5.0.37.

Once you’ve got that installed along with the Xcode Developer Tools (found on your Leopard DVDs in the Optional Installs folder) you are ready to fire up the Terminal and install the MySQL Gem. You’ll be prompted for your admin password after the first command.


sudo -s
ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

If you’re on a PPC system, just replace `-arch i386` with `-arch ppc` and you should be good to go.

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