While you can download MySQL as a DMG package, a number of users would prefer to install it as a Docker instance. You won’t find the macOS downloads on the same web site as other downloads. You can use the following macOS download site.

After installing Docker on your macOS, you can pull a copy of the current MySQL Server with the following command:

docker pull mysql/mysql-server

You should create a mysql directory inside your ~/Documents directory with this command:

mkdir ~/Documents/mysql

Then, you should use the cd command to change into the ~/Documents/mysql directory and run this command:

pwd

It should return the following directory: …

What do the acronyms I18N or L10N stand for? What do they mean for developers of mobile applications in particular?

I hosted a session about localizing mobile applications at Developer Week 2014 in Nuremberg. It covers — among other things — text, numbers, date and time, images, and other localizable resources.

See the codecentric blog for slides and some more details.

The post and the slides are also available in German.

One thing that gets tedious in the IT community and Oracle community is the penchant for Windows only solutions. While Microsoft does an excellent job in certain domains, I remain a loyal Apple customer. By the way, you can install Oracle Client software on Mac OS X and run SQL Developer against any Oracle Database server. You can even run MySQL Workbench and MySQL server natively on the Mac OS X platform, which creates a robust development platform and gives you more testing options with the MySQL monitor (the client software).

Notwithstanding, some Windows users appear to malign Apple and the Mac OS X on compatibility, but they don’t understand that it’s a derivative of the Research Unix, through BSD (Berkeley Software …

In teaching, I had a problem because my students have different base operating systems, like Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OS X. I needed a teaching and lecture platform that would let me teach it all (not to mention support their environments). That meant it had to virtualize any of the following with a portable device:

• Windows 7 or 8 hosting natively an Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Windows 7 or 8 hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Mac OS X hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Ubuntu hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or …

Over on the codecentric blog I published an article about localizing iOS and OS X applications called "Pseudolocalization for Cocoa Apps". It is probably the first of a few, because it turned out rather long already.

I have been meaning to write this down for quite some time, but it always eluded me. When you are using Time Machine to back up your Mac, you get the chance of password-protecting your backups.

Whenever the machine is restarted you will have to unlock the disk by entering the password, unless you store the password for the backup disk in your keychain. For paranoia's sake (and to keep the password fresh in my memory, just in case) I do not store the password in the keychain.

Now, what happens quite regularly to me is this: I reboot the machine for some reason or other, and while it is doing that, I leave the room and do something else. Before I know it, maybe an hour has passed before I come back. In the meantime, the external Time Machine drive has gone to sleep, because it was not used for an extended period of time. On the screen, there is the password dialog dutifully waiting for me to unlock the protected volume.

As …

While I try to contain everything about installing MySQL in a single post that I update from time-to-time, Mac OS X, Mountain Lion (10.8.x), requires some pre-steps. You must install XCode, and the Command Line Tools. This post provides the screen shots and step-by-step instructions.

Before you can do any of these steps, you must connect to the Apple Store and download XCode. Dependent on your internet speed this may take some time. Generally, it’s an hour or less.

1. After installing XCode, click the Rocket Spaceship in the Mac Dock to launch a view of your Applications. Launch XCode by clicking on the hammer overlaying the blue background XCode icon shown below.

1. After launching …

A couple students in one of my classes ran into a problem when competing Java threads tried to insert new rows in a table. They raised an error when they tried the DELAY keyword to avoid the race (collision) condition in an INSERT statement. It was simple to explain to them that the DELAY keyword doesn’t work with an InnoDB table. Any attempt throws the following error:

      ERROR 1616 (HY000): DELAYED OPTION NOT supported FOR TABLE 'message'

Important Update: INSERT DELAYED is gone in MySQL 5.6.6 (announcement) and the whole issue comes down to synchronizing threads (some dislike the solution) or using the ON DUPLICATE KEY …

Over the course of a workday I tend to accumulate lots of browser windows, and even more tabs inside them.  Up to now, I would often lose track of what which tabs were open in which window and in which space. In the end, I would often just open a page again in a new tab of the window I happened to be in at the moment, increasing the overall clutter.
With the advent of persistent application state across reboots or application restarts as well as fullscreen apps in Mac OS X Lion that situation has gotten even worse.

The "Window" menu in Safari does not help too much, because it only shows the tabs of the currently focussed window. Today, while wondering why a website was not displaying correctly, I accidentally found a remarkably simple (and built-in!) way of showing all open tabs across all open Safari windows.

Just hit Cmd-Alt-A or pick "Activity" from the Window menu in any Safari window to open or focus the …

After my recent Mac OS X 10.7 Lion upgrade I was greeted with a dialog box after reboot telling me that
com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue. Type the name and password of a user in the "Developer Tools" group to allow this.
No problem, I thought, and entered my credentials. Alas, to no avail. My name and password were rejected, which had me a little panicked at first, because I thought the OS upgrade might somehow have botched my account, potentially locking me out of my Mac later.

Hitting cancel would only get rid of the message for a few seconds, then it would reappear, again and again.
Turns out the solution was quite easy: Go the Mac App Store and download Xcode 4.1. Once the installer has finished downloading, …