This is the day: Apple will start their press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. At 10:00 am PST or 07:00 pm MEZ.

Like the legendary Steve Jobs Keynotes in the past, it is quite a tradition that some journalists blog live from the event … so Apple fans all over the planet can take part on the press conference. Here are the most important liveblogs:

• Jason Snell, Dan Moren & Jonathan Seff, Macworld.com
• Jason Chen for Gizmodo
• Erica Ogg for cnet news
• Joshua Topolsky for engadget
• John Paczkowski for All Things Digital
• Technologizer staff for Technologizer
• Ars staff for Ars Technica
• John Biggs for TechCrunch / CrunchGear
• Brian X. Chen for Gadget Lab at Wired

As soon as the videorecording of the event is online as a Quicktime videostream … there’ll be an update

MAMP, a local webserver environment for the Mac, is perfect for testing, developing and designing with WordPress. MAMP comes with a ready to use configuration of Apache, MySQL and PHP in a single folder.
But after installing and configuring a WordPress blog, you may loose the access to the MAMP start page:

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.
Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) PHP/5.2.11 DAV/2 Server at localhost Port XXXX

That’s a big issue, as the start page links to the local phpMyAdmin page for MySQL-database configuration. So you cannot admin the database anymore.
I traced down the problem to a wrong placed file: When I configured the WordPress installation via the web-interface, an .htaccess file was placed in the root directory of my harddrive. Quite scary … but a problem which can be fixed easily

As always: no guarantee and on your own risk … especially the Terminal is a wonderful tool … but if you do the wrong thing, you may be in serious trouble!

You normally do not recognize the .htaccess file within the Finder: all filenames starting with a dot are hidden files in a UNIX system … and the Finder does not show those hidden files. But if you use the Terminal, you can look at all the hidden files easily.
So fire up the Terminal app and go to the root directory of your hard drive:

cd /

then looks at all the files in your root directory:

ls -la

If you find a .htaccess there … you probably found your problem. But look inside the file before your rename or delete it:

cat .htaccess

The easiest way to proceed is to rename the htaccess file:

mv .htaccess htaccess-backup

This way the file is shown in the Finder again and does not confuse your MAMP installation. If you know what to do you can delete the renamed file now within the Finder and drag it to the trash

Some days ago I published a first solution for reactivating printing on OKI-printers from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard … some of you managed it to reactivate the printer by following the instructions – others are still coping with that problem. Also I was disappointed to see that the solution broke again and I wasn’t able to print from Snow Leopard again. That was really annoying – so I spent some time again to find a proper solution. Here it is: Version 2 of how to solve the problem … and as always: no guarantee and on your own risk:

Problem: After updating from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard the installed printer driver for the OKI-postscript driver does not work anymore. Here it’s an OKI MFP C5540 … but it should also work with other models, like the OKI C5450 or C8800. The printer diver was installed under Leopard and worked quite well. After finishing the update to 10.6 you are able to send a print job to the printer, but an error message shows up in the print queue.

Diagnosis: Two bugs may cause the problem: Some of the OKI-printer drivers just disregard case sensitivity in their path names – this wasn’t a problem in former Mac OS X versions – but it is a problem in Snow Leopard. The other bug – which even leads to a malfunction if the path names are right – is some wrong file permissions. And this causes Snow Leopard to hiccup when you try to print on an OKI-Printer.

Solution: The easiest way to solve the problems and get rid of the bugs is following three major steps:

1. Delete the old OKI printer drivers under the folder “/Library/Printers/” … if there are any.
2. Install a new OKI driver. This will also create the folder “/Library/Printers/OKIDATA”. Then install the specific printer driver for your OKI-printer (especially the PPD file).
3. Repair the file permissions.

You only need the OKI printer drivers and you have to put in some Terminal commands. But let’s do it step by step:

• Log into your Mac as an administrator.
• Step 1: Delete the old OKI files and folders:
• Don’t forget to backup your data before you start!
• Navigate to the following folder in the Finder and delete the folder “OKIDATA” or “Okidata” – if there is any.

  Macintosh HD/Library/Printers/

• Within the folder “PPDs” you may find also some OKI files – at my Mac it was “Oki C5540.ppd” – delete also these files.
• Step 2: Re-installation of the OKI printer driver. The installation program of older printer drivers may cause problems when creating the “OKIDATA” folder: They may name this folder “Okidata” and put in an old OKfilterA-file.
• Therefore you should download and install the printer driver for C5550n-MFP of OKI-USA specifically for Leopard users first. Just click on the “Mac OS X.5″ link on the printer driver page of OKIDATA-USA, download the installer.
• Then start the installer and put in your password. The installation program will create the folder “OKIDATA” as needed.
• If the C5550n MFP is not the OKI printer you have, you have to download install also the specific printer driver for your OKI-printer model. I had to choose the C5540n MFP. The installation will not overwrite the folder OKIDATA and only put’s the missing PPDs into the right folders.
• Step 3: Repair folder & file permissions. Open the program “Terminal” – you’ll find it under “Programs/Utilities”.
• Input the following command into the appearing command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

  sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Printers/OKIDATA

• Now, you’ll be prompted for your password … so put in your password of the admin account and finish the input by pressing the return key again
• Input a second command into the command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

  sudo chmod 775 /Library/Printers/OKIDATA/Filters/OKfilterA

• A little complicated – but it works. Just exit the Terminal program and restart your Mac. Then you can setup your OKI-printer and select the specific OKI-printer driver manually.

On Sep 9th 2009 at 9am PST Apple invited selected journalists to a special event in San Francisco. Apple did not bring up the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger on stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater … but their song “It’s only Rock’n Roll (But I like it)” from 1974 was the intro of the event
Steve Jobs showed up on stage the first time since his liver transplantation and got a very warm welcome. Great to see, that he is doing better, now. He and Phil Schiller shared a lot of news and innovations:

Video-on-demand Quicktime-Stream of the Apple Special Event September 2009

Here are the facts of the 75min event:

Sales figures:

• Apple sold 30 million iPhones over the last 2 years
• In total they sold 220 million iPods since now. 20 million of these are iPod touch and 100 million are iPod Nano devices
• This means of over 50 million customers have access to the AppStore and can buy apps.
• 1.8 billion AppStore app-downloads (without updates)
• iTunes is #1 music retailer in the world
• iTunes has more than 100 million accounts

iTunes & iPhone OS update:

• iTunes 9 and iPhone OS update 3.1
• Genius-recommendations for apps in the AppStore
• 30.000 ringtones
• Genius Mixes … automatic mixes of songs in your library
• Improved synchronization
• Management of the iPhone / iPod touch apps within iTunes
• Home Sharing of songs
• Improved interface and optimized navigation within iTunes
• iTunes LP for music albums – the interactive replacement for LP-booklets
• iTunes Extras for Movies – Extras and chapter-selection for movies
• iTunes wish list

Sneak previews of new games:

• Ubisoft – Ben Mattens: Assasins Creed II Discovery
• Tapulous – Bart Decrem: Riddim Ribbon
• Gameloft – Mark Hickey: Nova
• EA Electronic Arts – Travis Boatman: Madden NFL 10

Update of the iPod product line:

• iPod touch – new price tags for iPod touch: $199 8GB – $299 – 32GB – $399 64GB. The two bigger models also have a faster processor and are up to 50% faster and they also support OpenGL ES 2.0 – like the iPhone 3GS.
• iPod classic – now comes with 160GB at the same price
• iPod shuffle – new colors and better prices as well as a new polished stainless steel special edition.
• iPod Nano – comes with a video camera, an fm-radio, audio recording, a pedometer and in many different colors.