Changing the keyboard layout in Mac OS X 10.6.4 (Snow Leopard)

On Mac keyboards, the ” and @ are  transposed compared to the standard British keyboard layout. To make the keys behave as displayed on the keyboard, I used the following procedure:-

1. Download the keylayout file as described http://www.gingerbeardman.com/UK.keylayout/ and place the UK.keylayout file under your home directory in Library/Keyboard Layouts
2. Log out, then log back in
3. Choose System Prefs -> Language & Text, and select the “Input Sources” tab
4. Scroll down the list to the ‘UK’ entry, and tick the box. (The British layout is still ticked, and is greyed out)
5. Tick the box ‘Show Input menu in menu bar’
6. In the system menu bar at the top of the screen, there should be a small Union Jack symbol. Right click on that, and select the ‘UK’ keyboard symbol. This activates your new keyboard layout.

XAMPP

I recently found a very useful tool called XAMPP. This makes the installation of Apache web server, PHP and MySql very easy. It provides a useful administration panel, and web based control centre for these components.