Wednesday, October 1, 2008
First, the easy part, installing memcached and libmemcached using MacPorts:
sudo port install memcached libmemcached
Now, for the memcached gem — not quite so easy for me on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard):
sudo gem install memcached
Building native extensions. This could take a while…
ERROR: Error installing memcached:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
…
extconf.rb:21: shared library ‘libmemcached’ not [...]
Monday, September 29, 2008
Ruby DCamp is coming up on October 11 and 12 in Washington, DC. It will be an unconference, which means that the participants will drive the event.
It has a big emphasis on participation from Rubyists of all levels, whether new or experienced. DCamp is being planned by some very involved people in the [...]
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The “traditional” way of setting up paths in *nix bash environments is to use the ~/.profile file. However, I recently read about /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d and wanted to give them a try. I tried rearranging /etc/paths to look like this:
/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin
Then I restarted my Terminal and inspected the path. No change. That’s strange. My principle of least [...]
I’ve seen the phrase “rock star software developer” one too many times. This trite and misleading metaphor needs to die. By decapitation if necessary.
In my opinion, the key ingredients of being a rock star are mediocre talent, a massive publicity machine, and an insatiable ego. These are not qualities that I want [...]
I’m comparing some open source Javascript plugins. I won’t name names (unless I change my mind), because my point is not to bring public shame. I respect anyone who takes the time and effort to release an open source project.
That said, I don’t think there is ever an excuse for releasing codes that been [...]
MySQL was feeling lonely, so I decided to install PostgreSQL as well:
sudo port install postgresql83 postgresql83-server
Now update your path by adding this line to your .profile:
export PATH=”/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin:$PATH”
# the exact order is up to you
I also recommend adding the architecture flag if you use an Intel-based Mac:
export ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″
# Don’t forget to restart your terminal or [...]
I recently installed Ruby 1.8.7 in /usr/local. I have Ruby 1.8.6 installed via MacPorts in /opt/local. I couldn’t understand why TextMate’s Ruby bundle was running Ruby 1.8.7 even though my bash .profile was setting PATH correctly; i.e. /opt/local/bin was before /usr/local/bin.
Several people in the #textmate IRC channel helped out, including Allan, the creator of TextMate, [...]
I just gave a quick talk about MethodTrails at RailsConf 2008.
MethodTrails visualizes the method call graph of Ruby source code. It generates a dot file that can be viewed with Graphviz. It requires Ruby 1.9, which gives you a great excuse to download the latest Ruby and see what it is all about. MethodTrails uses [...]
At time marker 50:35 in his Git presentation to Google, Linus has a slide that says ”Performance is not secondary… it affects how you work .. and it affects quality.” At 54:50 Linus talks about “the kind of performance that actually changes how you work / it allows you to work in a completely different manner.”
These quotes are in [...]
Sometime last week an idea popped in my head (most likely because I heard it mentioned sometime earlier) — why not use Git for backing up important server files (especially ones that live in /etc). I haven’t tried it out yet, but here are some interesting links that I plan on checking out soon:
A backup [...]