Old habits die hard. Whenever i upgrade to a new OS i like to do a clean install and OS X Lion was no different1. Everything went smoothly until i tried to install an older version of ruby in RVM (ree 1.8.7). Then the shit hit the fan. After some digging i realized the issues were because Xcode 4.2 only installs LLVM GCC which doesn’t play nicely with some older open source packages. There are a plethora of solutions online simply telling me to set my CC environment variable to /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 except — since i did a clean install and installed Xcode 4.2 as the first version on this machine — i had no non-llvm gcc. The solution after some digging through the homebrew wiki was a stand-alone OS X installer for GCC designed to free developers from the hefty download size of a full Xcode install (and for that brief period where Apple lost its mind and tried to charge for Xcode).
1: For those interested it couldn’t be easier, just follow these instructions from Mashable.
I’ve been using tmux for local development and remote pairing pretty much full-time in the last few months. The ability to create a session in my terminal with all the typical tabs and panes i use for web development, name it, and then just drop it to work on another project is amazing. Switching between projects now takes seconds instead of minutes to reopen tabs. The only issue i’d run into is remembering on which port i hosted the local server; was this project 3001 or 3002? Enter pow. Pow is a simple little monitoring script written by the guys over at 37 Signals to allow you to run named rack servers. It’s as simple as linking your rack app into ~/.pow. For example the following line:
ln -s ~/Code/MyApp ~/.pow/myapp
provides you with http://myapp.dev as an alias. No more remembering ports! There are a few little issues such as having to touch a specific file (/tmp/restart.txt) to restart the servers but it really does save time despite it.
I learned to code using emacs but ever since finding TextMate a few years back my meta-fu has been waining and i’ve become more and more used to using a weird mixture of emacs commands and OS X native text navigation commands. As such i’ve compiled a list – partially for my own use – of must-have TextMate bundles and plugins. Most of these focus on ruby/rails and web development as that’s where i spend the majority of my days.
Simple concept: run ack via a window in TextMate. Faster than find-in-project and formatted a little better as well. The default shortcut is ⌃⌥⌘F (Control-Option-Command-F).
Instead of the (rather annoying) default TextMate drawer how about a little more like Xcode?
SCSS > SASS. There, i said it. So you might as well have decent syntax-highlighting and shortcuts.
While i’m not the biggest fan of HAML in the world we do use it a lot at We Are Titans so having a decent bundle on hand is a must.
While not a bundle or plugin, filtering files from TextMate’s view is an absolute must if you work in a specific framework (eg Rails) most of the time. Certain folders like tmp and log are mostly useless when performing a find-in-project or go to file. Crafting the perfect regular expression for this is the real challenge. Mine currently looks like the following:
!.*/(\.[^/]*|vendor|build|docs?|log|tmp|CVS|_darcs|_MTN|\{arch\}|blib|.*~\.nib|.*\.(framework|app|pbproj|pbxproj|xcode(proj)?|bundle))$
I’ve only made slight variations to the default to avoid some of the rather nasty folders in the rails world.
So Civilization V [Flash Warning] – the latest buggy installment of Sid Meier’s lovechild of a game series – was ported to the Mac and is available on Steam as a multi-system download; awesome, right? Well unfortunatley Aspyr did too good of a job porting the game and it came with some of the same annoyances as the Windows version. Namely that you have to sit through the obnoxious intro each time you launch the game. Thankfully this issue has already been solved for us by the Windows community and all that really changes is the directory path for the ini file we need to edit. So here goes, how to skip the annoying Civilization V intro screen in OS X:
- Open ~/Documents/Aspyr/UserSettings.ini
- Search for “SkipIntroVideo” (without quotes)
- Set the value to “1″ (again without quotes)
I also have to say i’m disappointed, but not surprised, that Aspyr appears to be completely unaware of the Library folder and like so many other cheap OS X ports throws all their files in the Documents folder like this is a Windows box. Keep it classy Aspyr.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the 24 Hour Comics Day event at the Lab — a couple of weeks to catch up on sleep it feels like. The event was a blast despite turning the weekend into one massive tiring day. A few lab members made it through the night as well which gave us a chance to work on some projects. Namely the internet skillcrane, my MAME cabinet, and lots of cleaning and organizing. Thanks to 757 CCC for organizing the event!
Check out the time lapse video of the event bellow:
