Archive for OS X

Merb Gem Cleanup

November 25th, 2009 • DataMapper, Merb, OS X, Ruby, programming

It seems to be a common issue for us Merbists, who depend on multiple Gems for merb to play nicely to get into a bit of a mess as gems are updated.

So, at times a cleanup is in order. Here is what i’ve done to cleanup my merb setup:

$ sudo gem update --system
$ gem search --no-version merb | grep merb | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of merb
$ gem search --no-version dm | grep dm | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of data_mapper
$ gem search --no-version data_objects | grep data_objects | xargs sudo gem uninstall -a # NOTE: removes all old version of data_objects
$ sudo gem sources -c
$ sudo rm PATH_TO_GEMS/cache/merb* # PATH_TO_GEMS is the path to your rubygems install.  Mine is /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
$ sudo rm PATH_TO_GEMS/cache/dm*
$ sudo gem install -r merb

This was taken from the meb installation instructions at: http://wiki.merbivore.com/howto/installation/gems

Setting up Merb, Cucumber and Webrat (and friends) on Snow Leopard

September 4th, 2009 • 2 comments Cucumber, Mac, Merb, OS X, Ruby, Webrat, bdd, programming, software development

My upgrade to Snow Leopard killed my Merb, Cucumber and Webrat setup so i had to start afresh. That was the bad. The good is that some manual hacks that were required in Leopard are no longer necessary, meaning I can rely on direct gem installations.

Here’s what i did:

  1. Install Ruby and Gems
    Follow instructions on http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and-rails-on-snow-leopard/
  2. Install merb, rspec, cucumber, merb_cucumber and mongrel and dependencies
    sudo gem install merb rspec cucumber roman-merb_cucumber mongrel term-ansicolor treetop diff-lcs nokogiri do_sqlite3
  3. Install webrat
    sudo gem install hoe hpricot webrat
  4. Fix Firefox bug with Snow Leopard
    For some reason the libsqlite3.dylib  library in FireFox 3.5.2 is out of date and breaks cucumber under Snow Leopard. Thankfully, it’s a simple fix:
    mv /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib.orig
    cp /usr/lib/libsqlite3.dylib /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/libsqlite3.dylib
  5. Install Selenium
    sudo gem install Selenium
    sudo gem install selenium-client
  6. Install the textmate cucumber bundle
    http://github.com/bmabey/cucumber-tmbundle/tree/master

Deprecated Instructions on Snow Leopard that were required on Leopard

The following ugly hacks were required on Leopard with it’s default Ruby installation. These are no longer required (at least on my machine) on Snow Leopard:

Manual hack of Selenium

http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/setting-up-selenium

As the instructions recommended replacing the Selemium RC jar file () in the installed gem with one from the Selenium website, i had to find out where the gem had installed. Thankfully, gem -h pointed me toward gem help commands and from there i ran gem environment – This told me where gems are installed locally and i found that Selemium RC had been installed into /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/Selenium-1.1.14/ I replaced as advised and then ran selenium from within the app root and all worked fine, using the replacement. I then downloaded and ran the test selenium code from http://github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/tree/master/examples/selenium running selenium in a different console and then running cucumber examples/selenium/features/ . It worked a treat and booted up selenium as required. Great!

Manual hack installation of webrat

Download http://github.com/gwynm/webrat/tree/master tar file. Git clone doesn’t work

sudo gem install hoe hpricot
cd downloaded and untarred file
rake gem
sudo gem install pkg/webrat-0.2.1.gem

OS X: Creating an alias in finder does NOT create a sym link!

December 7th, 2008 • Making Movies, OS X

This is quite unexpected. I have 45Gb of video footage and so moved it to my NAS and thought i’d created a sym link by creating an alias to that directory in my local Movies directory. As iMovie completely failed to recognise the new alias as a sym link, i had a peak in console and discovered that a Finder created alias is not a sym link and hence doesn’t work! How very odd!

After creating a sym link in the terminal, the problem is solved.

Odd! I’m sure i’ve missed something!

The origins of Mac OS X

August 28th, 2008 • Apple, Business, OS X
Tags: , , ,

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Quite an interesting history and explains why OS X is such a good OS