Slash Dot Dash

A guick reference to how I setup my new MacBook Pro for Ruby on Rails development.

Install Software

- Apple Software update

- Firefox 2.0

- TextMate

- Parallels

- Burn Free X

- CyberDuck

- MPlayer OS X (+ Binary Codec Packages)

Development (Ruby on Rails)

- X Code (with X11)

- MacPorts (DarwinPorts)

- MySQL 5.x

$ sudo port install mysql5 +server
$ sudo mysql_install_db5 --user=mysql
$ sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist

- Subversion

$ sudo port install subversion +tools

- Ruby

$ sudo port install ruby
$ sudo port install rb-rubygems
$ sudo port install rb-termios
$ sudo port install rb-mysql
$ sudo port install imagemagick

- Rails

$ sudo gem install -y rake
$ sudo gem install -y rails
$ sudo gem install -y capistrano
$ sudo gem install -y mongrel
$ sudo gem install -y mongrel_cluster
$ sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/ --with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/

http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/07/11/installing-rails-on-mac-os-x-tiger

- RDesktop

- YourSQL

Utilities

- Menu Meters (CPU, RAM, HDD, Network)

- Virtue Desktops

- Blank ScreenSaver

User settings

- Enable FileVault on home directory /Users/

- Prevent .DS_Store directories on network shares

$ defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
$ cp Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices.plist /Library/Preferences/
$ sudo chmod 777 /Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktopservices.plist 

Other

- Monolingual – remove 2.1G language files (keep British English, English and US English only)

- Bootcamp to dual-boot OS X and Windows XP (possibly Vista?)

Other Stuff

- Transfer files and iTunes / iPod library

- Restore Firefox bookmarks ( to ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.htm)

- Symbolic link /Sites to ~/Sites (due to FileVault security with Apache)

$ mkdir /Sites
$ mv ~/Sites/* /Sites
$ rm -rf ~/Sites
$ ln -s /Sites .

- Symbolic link /Music/iTunes Music to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (so that files in iTunes aren’t encrypted)

$ mkdir /Music
$ mkdir /Music/iTunes\ Music
$ ln -s /Music/iTunes\ Music ~/Music/iTunes

I can never remember this command on OS X, so here for my own reference:

sudo apachectl restart
/usr/sbin/apachectl restart: httpd restarted

Apache Web-Serving with Mac OS X

This week I’ve been mostly hacking away on new features for trawlr.com my personal online RSS agregator (it was built to scratch an itch). Apart from the Web 2.0 enhancements (check out the awesome logo, and not at all cliche), I’ve improved the security with role-based authentication (dull) and finally added RSS 2.0 feeds (very cool).

Having an RSS feed means that I can now use any desktop RSS reader (including offline reading) yet still enjoy the convenience of managing my feed subscriptions from a single website. Personally I wanted this feature so that I can use a widget or system tray notifier program to alert me when new items are added.

The RSS feed combines items from all your feeds in a mashup style (as per the website river-of-news view). It also provides a facility to get an RSS feed for a given tag, so for a feed of my Favourite sources I can subscribe to the following:

http://www.trawlr.com/rss/ben/Favourite/rss.xml

For Mac OS X, I have found a very handy tray notifier program (as shown by the RSS icon in the screen-shot of the system tray from my desktop below). The program is called RSS Menu and is available for free (donations welcome).

There is also an RSS dashboard widget, RSS Reader, that looks useful if you prefer widgets.

Have fun..!!

1. Insert CD/DVD source

2. Fire up a Terminal, you can then determine the device that is you CD/DVD drive using the following command:

$ drutil status
 Vendor   Product           Rev 
 MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-835E   GAND

           Type: DVD-ROM              Name: /dev/disk1
      Cur Write:    8x DVD          Sessions: 1
      Max Write:    8x DVD            Tracks: 1
   Overwritable:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Free:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Used:  364:08:27         blocks:  1638627 /   3.36GB /   3.13GiB
    Writability: 
      Book Type: DVD-ROM

3. Umount the disk with the following command:

$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted

4. Create the ISO file with the dd utility (may take some time):

$ dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso bs=2048

5. Test the ISO image by mounting the new file (or open with Finder):

$ hdid file.iso

6. The ISO image can then be burnt to a blank CD/DVD.

Apple have announced their new MacBook intel core-duo based laptops, available in the ‘ipod’ colours; white and black.

There is a useful comparison chart available to compare these new laptops with the MacBook Pros.

There are some pictures available from an enthusiastic new MacBook owner.

In terms of performance these new MacBooks are in the same league as the MacBook Pros sharing the intel core-duo CPUs. Ultimately it’s just their smaller size (13.3 inch screen) and budget graphics adapter that are the difference. I can definitely see these laptops selling well to the iPod generation – those who are looking for a it just works machine and looking for a hip replacement to their Windows PC.

Of note is that these new MacBooks come with “glossy” screens (also now available as an option on the MacBook Pros). This is causing a bit of a stir on the ‘net with some proponents suggesting that the general public is stupid and drawn to buy shiny things even if they perform worse (screen flare as shown by the flickr pictures linked above). I’ve recently seen a new Dell laptop with a similar shiny screen and although it looked impressively bright the flare was significant.

Now if I could just find a way of getting £1999 I’d buy one of the new 17” MacBook Pro laptops to replace my current 17” PowerBook G4 in an instant.

Not only is it supposedly 5x faster (nice marketing spin!) but it can triple boot Windows and Linux thanks to Apple’s BootCamp technology. Not that I desperately want to run Windows on a Mac; but it’s good to know that you can.

Suppose I could always try selling my soul on eBay ;-)

Update: Unpacking a brand-new MacBook Pro 17

Well this is odd.

I go out and buy a very tasty, shiny new Apple PowerBook G4 17 for a rather hefty amount of ££s and you know what, it didn’t even have a hash key!

Now this could be a rather big drawback as the main reason for buying the PowerBook was so that I could run the world’s greatest text editor for Ruby (and that’s another story)!

Anyone who has programmed in Ruby will realise the drawback of not having a # since this is used for commenting. It’s also a requirement for many Unix-based config files (although when using Nano the key combination Esc - Esc - 035 produces a #).

A quick Google later and the answer is pretty simple… alt - 3 produces a big fat #

Apart from that the PowerBook is sweet (and much more on that later).