Problems with MySQL Gem and Rake on Snow Leopard

I recently got a new MacBook Pro and had problems creating a new database for my Rails app on Snow Leopard. Running rake db:create left me with the following useless error:
Couldn’t create database for {”username”=>”root”, “adapter”=>”mysql”, “database”=>”delete_me”, “password”=>nil, “socket”=>”/tmp/mysql.sock”}, charset: utf8, collation: utf8_unicode_ci (if you set the charset manually, make sure you have a matching [...]

Magento Unexpectedly Prompts to Download index.php

This was a new one for me. I was installing Magento today on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.3 LTS to be exact) and ran into a problem where accessing the base Magento install URL would prompt to download the index.php file. The odd thing was that I could access the index.php directly and it would work just [...]