Setup Sublime Text for F# Development

After being asked to use Visual Studio 2015 for F# Development, I decided it’s way more lightweight to to develop it on my Mac using Sublime Text 3.

Software you need installed:

• Install Mono on your Mac
• Of course Sublime Text 3
• And the best package manager for Sublime, Package Control.

Install (using package control) these packages with package control in Sublime Text:

• F# – Gives you syntax Highlighting
• F-Sharp – Autocomplete, tooltips, definitions, etc.
• SublimeREPL – A multi language REPL including F#

If you are used to Visual Studio for any F# development; you can create some Sublime text keyboard shortcuts using your key bindings settings:

• Open REPL : CTRL+ALT+F
• Send selected code to REPL : CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

The bindings I use are shown below:

You’ll want to configure Sublime 3 indentation settings to include these options to replace Tabs with spaces; as Sharp hates your tabs.

This setup also works on Sublime for Windows, but you need fsi.exe in your path and working with all dependencies (Windows SKD, .NET Framework etc.).

Windows 10 UEFI USB Boot in VMWare Fusion 7

You’ve downloaded your purchased Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft, and you’ve managed to create a bootable UEFI USB stick.
Now you’ve decided to run Windows 10 in VMWare Fusion Pro on your Mac. Yet the USB stick can NOT be booted from.
There is a solution. VMWare fusion has some (unsupported) EFI options you can enable to effect a USB boot.
First you’ll want to create a Windows 10 VM in VMWare Fusion.
Create a new VM, and select the more options icon:

Select Create a custom virtual machine and select Continue:

Select Windows 10 as the operating system, and select Continue – x64 is selected here as I’m 64 bit all the way:

Leave the virtual disk options and select Continue:

On the Summary Screen, you can use the Customize Settings button to change your VM defaults. I updated my RAM to 8GB, my CPU Cores to 2, and changed the VM Disk size to 100GB (60GB may be a bit small for most power users).

Before you start the VM; you’ll need to modify the vmx file directly.

1. In the Virtual Machine Library, right click on the Windows 10 VM and select Show in Finder.
2. Right click on the vmwarevm container and select Show Package Contents
3. Edit the *.vmx file using your favourite text editor
4. Append the following options to the configuration to enabled EFI booting:

firmware = "efi"
efi.legacyBoot.enabled = "true"


The Legacy boot option allows VMWare to see the USB device in some cases; and was required for me.
Boot your new VM:

You’ll find that the new EFI boot loaders are picked up, but not yet the USB. Since you couldn’t attach a USB before starting, you can do it now. Open the VM preferences and attach the USB containing the EFI Boot files:

VMWare will now boot into the Windows 10 setup.

Thanks to a post by A Virtual Den for pointing me in the right direction for the VMX LegacyBoot option!

Mantra: backup backup backup backup

Someone sent me an email which asked what to do since:

one of my external hard drives, the one with EVERYTHING I REALLY, REALLY WANT on it has died

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Leopard, Apache2 and MySQL

I’ve just cloned this blog to a development version on my Macbook Pro. The Mac has Apache2 installed by default, so I just had to get mysql working.

Downloading MySQL and installing on Leopard is a breeze with the native package.

I migrated my database (dump/restore) and recreated my wordpress user, but still kept getting this error:

Error establishing a database connection

The user could log into the database from the console as shown:

lantrix@lexx:~ $ mysql -u wordpress -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 19
Server version: 5.1.34 MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> use wordpress;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed
mysql> show tables;
+-----------------------------+
| Tables_in_wordpress |
+-----------------------------+
| sk2_blacklist |


So what is the problem?

Google provides an answer, with a log lived post from My Macinations providing the solution. It’s all to do with correcting your php.ini with the proper MySQL socket location.

Now, back to testing my new version of the Twitter Tags wordpress plugin. #hashtags now work!