Category archives: flotsam & jetsam

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.

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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
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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*))
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