Does this error message scare you ?
SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away
Today we will take a look at it and find ways to deal with it 🙂 . after investigating the issue and google it online, i founded two most common reasons (and fixes) for the MySQL server has gone away (error 2006) are:
This is a typical mysql error on Mac when you try to start Rails server, libmysqlclient.18.dylib can be something else like that libmysqlclient.16.dylib, .. etc
The root reason is : libmysqlclient.18.dylib is not under /usr/lib – this is place where Ruby (or Rails ?) will look for this dynamic library
I don’t like the idea of having to change permissions of my magento install to add on new extensions. There’re some services that allow you to download extension in compressed file like http://freegento.com/ddl-magento-extension.php , so you will only need to extract then copy&paste to your Magento installation folder, this is also a pain to me, especially when i’m on a Mac (yes, Mac is bad at merging files) . Thanks to Magento, we have command line for this type of work.
Do you want to use multiple key pairs for github and servers ? Ever wondered how people just type ‘ssh myserver’ and it automagically connects ? you will know some cool methods after next few minutes
Normally, to switch between windows, we use ‘Window’ menu on the menu bar, but you can do it quicker using this hot key (keys combination)
⌘ + ~
yes, press Command button and tilde button together 
Have you ever wanted to enable Magento global messages when you have Full Page Cache (FPC) turned on ? I wanted it, but after several hours of debugging and studying magento caching mechanism, i found it’s hard to punch a hole for Magento global message, i thought about an alternative solution – ignoring FPC when we have global message !
I faced this issue when i tried to create a new user on Ubuntu server, new user was given the Bourne shell rather than the Bash shell, this is a basic shell located in /bin/sh, and it looks boring, you won’t be able to use auto-completion with such shell. in this article, i will show you how to change default shell of an unix user.
1. Moving the old database
The first thing we have to do is to create a backup of our magento community database and create a new database (for example, magentoee) and then dump there the backup we made. At this moment we have an exact copy of the original database.
Have you ever come across the problem of needing to chmod many directories and sub-directories, but you don’t want to touch any of the files? Maybe it’s the exact opposite, or you need to recursively change the permissions on only files with a specific extension. If so, this article is for you
To change permission of all directories to 755, execute this command in terminal
Some people have claimed memory or performance problems with Dashboard. In my case, I just don’t use it, and dislike having applications running that I don’t use or need.
To disable Dashboard- type or paste the following exactly into the Terminal window: