candescence.org

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.