Installing Octopress (and Ruby via RVM) on a Lion box that has Xcode 4.2
Installing the latest Ruby via RVM on a Mac running OS X Lion and which has Xcode 4.2.x installed isn't as straightforward as it should be. This simple guide should help.
Mac
22 Nov 2011
In my quest to move away from WordPress (and PHP/MySQL, which reminds me far too much of 1999 for my comfort), I'm evaluating several static site blog solutions to migrate this blog to and to use for a couple of other blogs that I want to set up for next year. As part of the process, I wanted to give Octopress a shot. Octopress is a static site blogging solution built on mojombo/jekyll – the solution that powers GitHub Pages. The beauty of it is that you can simply deploy your blog to GitHub Pages, and even use a custom domain, simply by pushing to your repository (GitHub will pass your repository through Jekyll automatically–simples!)
The problem is that there are apparently issues with installing the dependencies on a box running Lion with Xcode 4.2. The following solution worked for me. I hacked it together from that StackOverflow thread as well as the Octopress Setup Guide:
I was working through a tutorial on Bogart and CouchDB and decided to implement the examples in CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript as I've been meaning to play with CoffeeScript for a while now.
One of the files in the tutorial is the package.json file for managing dependencies in the (absolutely lovely) package manager npm. When I wrote the data structure out in CoffeeScript, however, the compiled data structure wasn't valid JSON according to JSONLint (it was nested between parentheses, had unquoted keys, and a trailing semi-colon, as you can see in the code snippet.) (more...)
A simple CoffeeScript to JSON shell script for Macs
If you're as lazy as I am, you might want to write out your static data structures in CoffeeScript instead of JSON. This little script lets you convert a file containing a CoffeeScript data structure to valid JSON.
In March of this year, I created a Twitter library called XAuthTwitterEngine based on Matt Gemmell's awesome MGTwitterEngine library and the excellent work (and with the assistance) of a number of great developers (including Ben Gottlieb, Jon Crosby, Chris Kimpton, and Isaiah Carew, Steve Reynolds, and Norio Nomura). Back then, MGTwitterEngine didn't have oAuth/xAuth support and I built XAuthTwitterEngine as a stop-gap, with the intension of back-porting to MGTwitterEngine at some point.
Well, MGTwitterEngine has had excellent oAuth/xAuth for some time now and I finally got round to checking it out today only to realize just how much progress they've made. It's definitely time to deprecate XAuthTwitterEngine and start using MGTwitterEngine again (so I am back-porting Feathers to MGTwitterEngine at the moment).
XAuthTwitterEngine deprecated, use MGTwitterEngine (& new MGTwitterEngine demo app released)
I just released a demo project showing you how to use MGTwitterEngine and I've also deprecated XAuthTwitterEngine as that stop-gap is no longer necessary.
Lest you jump to conclusions from the title, no, I haven't had botox. My beloved blog, however, did just get a facelift (she's a little sore but recovering nicely!)
I've had a hard time trying to get Internet Explorer on Windows (under Parallels) to connect to the Google App Engine local development server running on OS X.
The interesting thing was that IE would connect to the built-in web server on the Mac without problem (using the Shared Network setting, I could also connect to any other web site.) But I couldn't connect to the development server either via IP or via the computer name using Bonjour for Windows.