RosemaryLong.com

It happens to everyone in this industry. “We need this done RFN!” is the message you get so when things don’t work the first time, the next instinct is to revert back to old ways.

For me, this was the case when I wanted to test sites I was developing in MAMP in Windows browsers. I tried the whole dyndns thing that the user manual outlines, but it didn’t work as I have a shared external IP. I reverted back to my old ways and set up websites on a subdomain of this one for testing. It was a huge pain when changes had to be done and tested quickly since I was constantly FTPing files and importing and exporting databases.

Today I listened to my inner diva (she often complains about doing tedious work) and figured it out, after over three months of doing it the hard way.

1. Check your System Preferences > Sharing settings and ensure that Web Sharing is off. You might also want to check your Firewall settings and allow connections for MAMP.
2. In VMWare Fusion, set your Network settings to Bridged. This will make it as if your VM and your Mac are peers but won’t restrict your access to external sites on your VM.
3. Check your MAMP ports. I went with the MAMP ports 8888 and 8889. You will need this for when you access your site from your VM.
4. Edit your hosts file on your Windows VM. Your hosts file is typically here: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and contains mappings. I entered my IP followed by the local name of my website, i.e. if I access my site through http://intactgrowth:8888 on my Mac, “intactgrowth” follows my IP in the hosts file.

That should be it. Much simpler and better than my other idea, which was to download Wamp on my VMs and share my code between two computers (this would’ve meant lots of DB work as well).

I was reading a very-relevant-to-right-now article on pmstories.com and came across this quiz to find out what kind of programmer I am. This is also one of those too long to tweet things, so I upgraded to a blog post about it. Yey.

Your programmer personality type is:

PHTC

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.