Pastie << self

Thanks Rails Machine. Long Live Pastie!

Just wanted to give a shout out to Rails Machine who just bumped Pastie's storage from 20gig to 40gig today. In case any of you don't know Rails Machine is an awesome place to host your Ruby on Rails hotness and they also provide the server, storage, and bandwidth to keep Pastie up and running.

Yes, I know Pastie has it's issues from time to time (the damn Ultraviolet library I think) but let no one confuse them with Rails Machine problems. :-)

Rails Machine rocks!

Leopard, 64-bit MySql, 32-bit Ruby, World of Pain

So I'm trying to get a Rails stack working on my new MacBook Pro... without much success. I thought I'd do the cool thing and install the 64-bit MySql (since I do have a 64-bit chip, ya know) but I've run into the same problems as others.

I've read these (found via Google):

• http://blog.bmn.name/2008/02/issues-with-mysql-27-gem/
• http://cho.hapgoods.com/wordpress/?p=158

I've tried tips from the comments:

• building various ways including ARCHFLAGS where arch is i368, x86_64, etc
• removing /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/universal-darwin9.0/mysql.bundle

No matter what I do I'm left with one of the following problems (i386 arch):

dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _mysql_init
  Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle
  Expected in: dynamic lookup

or this (x86_64 arch:)

dlopen(/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle, 9): no suitable image found.  Did find:
	/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle: mach-o, but wrong architecture - /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle

Several people said they found the solution, but nothing I've tried has worked. Does anyone have a better solution to this problem than downgrading back to the 32-bit version of MySql? I wonder if I built Ruby from ports if that would fix it.

Any suggestions? When I get THE answer (if there is one) I'll update this post.

UPDATE: One REAL solution posted here.

Where it all started

I supposed we all got started somewhere... I'm going thru old hard drives and old CDs today and thought I would post this. Without further ado, my first website. Eleven years ago.

Thank god I'm not alone

I'm really glad I'm not the only one who is speaking up when the smell coming from 37 Signals' direction starts to be a bit on the stinky side.

He's actually criticizing their posts on startups (which I usually enjoy, actually) but ends with this criticism:

If you’ve ever used their apps, you know how weak-sauce they are. So weak is their sauce that the first demo of Google App Engine was a quickly-made clone of their Campfire application. 37 Signals whined about and resulted in it being taken down. What a bunch of jokers.

I actually love 37 Signals' "weak-sauce" (translation: simple) apps... :-) I'm a paid user of most (and a lot of my clients pay for Campfire). I do agree though that it's ridiculous to build the absolute simplest apps possible (their claim) and then deny others the right to also build simple solutions that compete with their own.

Image from here:

If HuddleChat was a ripoff of Campfire then Campfire was a rip-off of iChat (or pick a more similar chat program, you have tons to choose from) which was a rip-off of mIRC which was a rip-off of... BBS chat?

Chat programs usually have history that scrolls off the top, include a text entry box, and allow file transfers . This is true of Campfire, HuddleChat, IRC, almost any major chat app I can think of. This is nothing new and 37 Signals doesn't own (or have a copyright for) the "concept" of group chat.

I know HuddleChat is old news, but this is my first opportunity to blog on it. :-)

TextMate to Keynote in 2 steps

Credit where credit is due: First, I have to give the credit for this to Allan Odgaard (of TextMate fame) and Ciaran Walsh. I just jumped into ##textmate and served as the catalyst by bringing up the topic and getting the ball rolling.

For my pastie presentation at RailsConf 2008 I showed a little code, but it was all screen snaps. I've since been told of this semi-annoying 4-5 step process to go from TextMate pretty code to a Keynote slide... but no more...

First, copy the "Create HTML From Document / Selection" command... yes, using the ++ command to copy... you can't just make a new command because evidentally you need some secret XML sauce that the original has and your copy will inherit... then change the command source to the following:

Update: You must put the duplicated command in the TextMate bundle, or this won’t work.

ruby -e'
require "jcode"
$KCODE="U"
require "#{ENV["TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT"]}/lib/doctohtml.rb"
require "#{ENV["TM_SUPPORT_PATH"]}/lib/progress.rb"
unit = ENV.has_key?("TM_SELECTED_TEXT") ? "selection" : "document"
TextMate.call_with_progress(:message => "Creating HTML version of #{unit}…") do
  print document_to_html( STDIN.read, :include_css => true )
end'|textutil -convert rtf -stdin -stdout|pbcopy
echo 'Done!'

You can see we're just piping the output of TM's HTML generation into textutil to generate RTF. Then we're placing that on the clipboard. Here is what my dialog looks like:

You can assign the "Copy with Style" command to your own key binding... then it's as simple as copy/paste. Two keystrokes, done.

This seems to work great with Leopard, but still needs some testing on Tiger. It currently fails with an error about stdin. But hopefully this tip will help those of you preparing presentations with nicely colored Ruby code.

Rails Machine Party @ RailsConf 2008

I was just reading John Nunemaker's blog where he mentioned the Rails Machine party among other things. I bumped into John at the party and he's pretty funny. :-) Anyways, as a Rails Machine customer (both directly and indirectly) I was invited and attended for my second straight year. There was the usual interesting people and interesting conversation. I had a good time and even learned a few things about SCSI controllers under Linux and Hawaii's version of the Grand Canyon.

I just wanted to give a shout out to Bradley, Rob, Jesse, and the whole (growing) Rails Machine gang. Every client I work with is hosted with RM and our experiences with hosting, service and support have been great. Rails Machine also kindly hosts Pastie free of charge.

I'm not much of a drinker, but conversation was good so I stayed until closing time. Before leaving I happened to catch a quick glance at the bill. Wow. I will say that I've never bought liquor and party food for 100+ people before at one time... but really... Wow.

Brad must love his customers as much as we love Rails Machine.

John had good things to say about the party as well so I just wanted to jump in there and second him as well as say: Keep up the great service and awesome parties Rails Machine! See you next year.

Pastie Lightning Talk at RailsConf 2008

Here are the (slightly updated) slides from my RailsConf 2008 presentation. You may miss some of the humor from the live version but I've also annotated some of the slides so they make a little more sense without me talking to them.

Enjoy.

Download the presentation as a PDF

Safari 3.1.1 and flash stops working

Ok, I'm not the first person to have this problem... skip to bottom for my solution. I'm just getting this out there... it might be my unique problem of everyone on the Internet.

• Macfixit
• Apple Discussion Forums
• Apple Discussion Forums again

Some people reported that plugin support just got turned off... and using Preferences to re-enable it fixed it. My problem however turned out to be much more complex.

I finally stumbled across the fact that Help -> Installed Plugins on my MBP was entirely blank... not a single plugin was working... so I moved them all... and then just put Flash back... it worked. So then I started putting all my other plugins back and restarting Safari each time. When I copied JavaPluginCocoa.bundle back the plugins page went blank again.

Solution

Since I had just installed a Java update earlier I downloaded that same update from apple.com and re-installed.

Problem fixed. Ugly test flash graphic you've never looked so good.

Update: I just found out my sound (YouTube, etc) still didn't think. This fixed it.