Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

This guide will show you how to access a computer located on your home network from outside of your local area network. For the purposes of this guide, let’s assume we are trying to access a HOME SERVER such as a Mac Mini located on your home WiFi router. The home computer could just as easily be a Ubuntu, or similarly flavored Linux machine. The first thing that we will need to do is determine your home IP address, and then we will setup port forwarding on your wireless router. Keep reading to get started with this process or go to learn how a SSH Tunnel works.

Read full article by Franklin

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Odds are, if you design Web sites with a database backend, you've worked with MySQL. You can manage this database from the command line, but it's not very user-friendly. Using the graphical tool phpMyAdmin helps, but not all Web hosting providers offer it or allow you to install it on the server. Fortunately, you can install it on your own box and manage several MySQL databases remotely at the same time, without having to install anything anywhere else.

Linux.com

Setting up your own web server on Mac to test various open source CMS is a doodle, thanks to MAMP.

MAMP provides you with:

• Apache 2
• PHP 4 / 5
• mySQL 5
• eAccelerator
• phpmyadmin

That is all you really need as a testing ground for web developement.

All you need to do is download MAMP (current version is 1.7.1). Once downloaded to your desktop, unpack and drag the icon to your applications folder and run it from your applications folder.

A control panel should appear that looks like this:

and then a webpage will popup in your default browser (screenshot below):

Now you can start to test your sites. Your web root folder is /Apllications/MAMP/htdocs

This is the folder where MAMP will be looking for any of your sites. This can be changed in your MAMP control panel by clicking on 'Preferences' though i would just leave as it. The thing you want to change in the 'preferences is the 'Ports' settings, click on 'Set to default Apache and MySQL ports so it should fill in as:

Apache Port: 80
MySQL Post: 3306

To save you all the hassle having to browse to your htdocs all the time, create an alias link to the folder. Do this by going to /Applications/MAMP/ find the folder /htdocs and right click on it then select 'Make Alias'. This should create a linked folder, drag this to your desktop.

If you need to make some changes to php.ini or the httpd.conf file you'll find them in Applications/MAMP/config folder.

MAMP allows you to switch between PHP 4 or 5, you find these settings in your preferences in the MAMP control panel. I would try and run PHP 5 at all times since PHP 4 support will be dropped by end of next month.

Each site you create should be placed in a folder in the web root. To access your sites use: http:localhost/{folder of site}/

By default, your mysql password is

user: root
password: root

If you are only using it on your Mac without public access then this is fine. But if you decide to open it up for public access then i highly recommend you change the mySQL password.

To do this, open up a terminal and enter:

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqladmin -u root -p password < NEWPASSWORD >

Instead of < NEWPASSWORD > use the new password you want.

Once the password has changed, remember to also set the new password for phpmyadmin. To change this, navigate to

/Applications/MAMP/bin/phpMyAdmin-X.X.X/config.inc.php

and open up the file config.inc.php with a text editor of your choice. Find the line:
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'root';

and change 'root' to your new password.

That is all, let the fun begin...

Over at LifeHacker website there is a nice article on how to running various versions of Internet Explorer on your Mac using an open source application.

Cool! with you don't want to use Bootcamp or Parallels .

Yes, those damn special characters that are supposed to be escaped in your code are never easy to remember when you need them.

Over at WebMonkey they have kindly compile are list of them for reference. Be sure to print it out. Otherwise, if you are running Firefox you may want to use this excellent extension: Unicode Convertor/Input Tool

There are many hidden files that Mac prevents the user from seeing as most of these files store essential data. There aren't any way to set them on in the preferences, however you can still view them using the Terminal or 3rd party programs. These hidden files has a period at the beginning of a file (ie, .login, .profile and etc).

Reason why Mac prevents the files from making it visible to a user is so they don't accidently delete them. It doesn't even allow you to change the file extension to a hidden file on your desktop.

If you are developer, at times it is necessary to view hidden files to edit them. For example, you might want to edit a .htaccess file from your local disk.

Here are 2 simple ways:

- Using the Terminal - use the command: ls -al

- Use TextWrangler or BBEdit - Go to 'File' and select 'Open Hidden'