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Ruby Enterprise Edition on OS X – a Quick Caveat

22Sep09

The gist: when trying to install RubyEE, remove all gems installed to ~/.gem first. Otherwise you will encounter exceptions like

[BUG] cross-thread violation on rb_gc()

Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition on OS X is pretty easy and straight forward; it installs itself to /opt/ruby-enterprise-<version>, along with its own copy of RubyGems.

RubyGems installed with the standard MRI Ruby do not work with RubyEE and have to be installed a second time using /opt/ruby-enterprise-<version>/bin/gem.

The caveat: both /usr/bin/gem and /opt/ruby-enterprise-<version>/bin/gem try to load gems from your personal gem path at ~/.gem first before looking in their respective gem paths. For example, if you have bluecloth installed to ~/.gem using the standard MRI ruby, RubyEE will try to load it and throw exceptions like

[BUG] cross-thread violation on rb_gc()

To solve this, you can either remove ~/.gem from your GEM_PATH environment variable, or simply uninstall all gems from there and reinstall them properly to /usr/lib/ruby using sudo gem install.

Filed: Rails, flotsam & jetsam | Tagged: ruby | No Comments

SpriteMe: A One-Click CSS Sprite Generator

15Sep09

Steve Souders from High Performance Web Sites gifts us SpriteMe, a bookmarklet that greatly simplifies the usage of CSS sprites.

When invoked, SpriteMe automatically identifies potential images to be grouped into a sprite, gives you one-click sprite creation through csscoolrunnings.com and re-inserts the new sprite into your site on the fly for testing.

Filed: web development | Tagged: CSS, tools | No Comments

Rails on the menu(bar)

06Sep09

The Rails API in your Mac's menu bar

Today I learned that Fluid, the Mac app that lets you create Single-Site Browsers, has the ability to create custom menu bar items as well — sweet!

So, how does “ajax-powered Rails API documentation in your menu bar, complete with keyboard shortcut” sound? Take a look at this short screencast, courtesy of yours truly:

Filed: OS X, Rails | Tagged: apps, OS X, Rails, screencast | 1 Comment

Five Hidden Preferences for Quicktime X

02Sep09

Apple’s latest movie player is quite the looker with its no-window, all-video design, but when it comes to making it bow to your will, you seem to be out of luck. It does not even have a preference menu — okay, we get it Apple: it’s take it or leave it.

Not so! Here’s five hidden preferences to remove some common annoyances and make Quicktime Player X more pleasant to use:

Make the controller bar hide more quickly

The controller bar in the new Quicktime Player X

This is actually the first secret preference for a mac app I’ve found on my own — yay strings!

The controller — the little bar containing the play/pause/forward/rewind buttons — sticks around a bit too long after you have stopped moving your mouse, obscuring the movie you’re trying to watch. Luckily,

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGUIVisibilityTimeout 1

makes it fade out after one only second.

Thanks to rorschach from the MacRumors forums for these other four tips:

Play movies automatically on open

This one drove me nuts, and I don’t understand why this isn’t the default: to have your movies playing automatically right after opening them, enter

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

Disable the rounded corners

If you prefer to see every last pixel of your video clip, down to the corners, enter

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoRoundedCorners 1

Show subtitles and closed captions automatically

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGEnableCCAndSubtitlesOnOpen 1

Allow multiple screen recordings at the same time

If you need to capture your desktop into multiple videos in parallel, this is for you:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGAllowMultipleSimultaneousRecordings 1

Filed: OS X, flotsam & jetsam | Tagged: os, osx, quicktime, tips, tricks | 3 Comments

Rails, Postgres, Snow Leopard and 64bit: a word of warning

31Aug09

After zipping through a painless upgrade to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on both my Macs, I found myself banging my head against the wall trying to get my Rails + Postgres stack running again.

There is a lot of great information out there on how to get everything up to 64bit goodness, and I merrily began the uninstall/recompile/reinstall dance. What followed was an excruciating eight hours of trying to get Postgres to compile to 64bit, and the pg gem — or any Postgres adapter for that matter — to link against it.

Long story short: make sure you actually have a 64bit Mac. Let me say that again: make sure your Mac is actually running Snow Leopard in 64bit.

As embarrassing as this, at some point I finally realized that both my Macs used Core Duo chips, not Core 2 Duos – which makes my Snow Leopard a plain-old 32bit installation. Markus Winter on A hat full of sky has a lot of great information on the subject matter, as well as a program that shows you exactly what mode your system is running in, and why.

So, us 32bit cat owners still have to compile pg with

sudo env ARCHFLAGS='i386' gem install pg -- --with-pgsql-dir=/usr/local/pgsql

- just as we had to on 10.5 Leopard.

What I hope to have learned from this:

Postgres is a fifteen year old project, crafted in ten thousands of man hours by countless programmers all smarter than me
Next time it tells me it does not want to compile in 64bit, I’ll listen.

Filed: OS X, Rails | Tagged: osx, Rails, troubleshooting | 3 Comments

How to fix your 3G USB stick in Snow Leopard

31Aug09

I bough a UMTS stick from O2 / Tchibo mobil just two weeks ago, and so far it’s been great – love the new-found freedom. Alas, it didn’t survive my otherwise smooth and painless upgrade to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard – its ugly “Mobile Partner” application kept crashing on me.

This is how I got my Huawei E160 (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) UMTS stick back to work:

forget about the crashing software – the dialer included in Snow Leopard is all you need
open Terminal.app and login as root user by typing sudo -sand entering your user account password
as the user root, open a text editor to create a new file by typing nano /etc/ppp/options
put these two lines in the file:
+pap -chap
then save by pressing CTRL-O and exit with CTRL-X. You can now close Terminal.app
open Snow Leopards network preferences pane. There should already be an entry in there for your 3G USB stick named HUAWEI… – select it to see its settings
“Telephone number” should be *99#, “Account name” and “Password” should be blank:
Click “Advanced” and make sure Other / Huawei Mobile Connect 3G is the selected modem:

That’s it! If you’ve fiddled around before trying this, you might want unplug and replug the stick once, but after that, you should be able to connect just fine.

Thanks to horrie66 from the Whirlpool user forums for the info!

Filed: OS X | Tagged: osx, troubleshooting | 14 Comments

flotsam & jetsam: listing .gitignore files in the Textmate project drawer

17Aug09

whatisnext:

Or, you could modify the Textmate File Pattern. Its not as tricky as it seems, in Textmate, goto Preferences -> Advanced. Then change the beginning of the File Pattern from:
(?!htaccess)
To:
(?!(htaccess|git*))

Filed: flotsam & jetsam | Tagged: Textmate | No Comments

How to change the output directory of metric_fu

15Aug09

I would like to treat the great reports generated by metric_fu as documentation and keep them in my repository. So how do we convince it to save its output in doc/ instead of tmp/ ?

Stew Welbourne has the answer:

MetricFu::Configuration.run do |config|
  config.base_directory     = 'doc/metrics'
  config.scratch_directory  = File.join(config.base_directory, 'scratch')
  config.output_directory   = File.join(config.base_directory, 'output')
  config.data_directory     = File.join(config.base_directory, '_data')

  config.saikuro  = {  utput_directory => File.join(config.scratch_directory, 'saikuro'),

  # the rest of your configuration goes here
end

Just make sure that your new target directory is two folders deep, as the original tmp/metric_fu is, or you may get in trouble with the graphing part of metric_fu. Voilà!

Filed: Rails | Tagged: metric_fu, Rails, testing | No Comments

The Internet is serious business

16Mar09

After a somewhat slow start with lots of contract work for my old employer, I’m sitting in a lovely shared office right in middle of the Hamburg Schanzenviertel.

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=114675687575236380275.000450e71e868b95779c3&ll=53.56635,9.963655&spn=0.007582,0.022745&output=embed&s=AARTsJoDU7_TWrnm8BY1wi2sTTHplqIxUQ&w=425&h=350]

A basic office supply set sits here, waiting to be unpacked. Steaming coffee in a styrofoam cup. There’s a cursor anxiously blinking in a New Document. Time to get busy – I can’t wait.

Filed: programmanstalt | | 1 Comment