Setting up Merb, Cucumber and Webrat (and friends) on Snow Leopard
September 4th, 2009 • Cucumber, Mac, Merb, OS X, Ruby, Webrat, bdd, programming, software development • 2 comments
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:
- Install Ruby and Gems
Follow instructions on http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-ruby-rubygems-and-rails-on-snow-leopard/ - 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 - Install webrat
sudo gem install hoe hpricot webrat - 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For some reason the libsqlite3.dylib library in FireFox 3.5.2 is out of date and breaks cucumber under Snow Leopard.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 - Install Selenium
sudo gem install Selenium
sudo gem install selenium-client - 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
How to open a Mac OS X sparsebundle when it shows up as a regular folder
July 16th, 2009 • Apple, Mac • No comments
This was taken from http://fplanque.com/dev/mac/os-x-sparsebundle-shows-up-as-regular-folder
What do you do if you have, say, an encrypted sparsebundle and some day you try to open it and you discover it shows up as a plain folder in the Finder instead as a bundle icon?
Double clicking will just open the folder and show you the bands that make up the bundle.
I’ve forgotten how to fix the issue, you can at least mount the contents of the bundle by typing this is the terminal: "/path/to/bundle/name_of_bundle.sparsebundle/"
Then you’ll have your virtual drive mounted on teh desktop, and if need be you can just copy them to a new sparsebundle.
Awesome tools for rapid UX prototypes – Letting you focus on the solution!
June 18th, 2009 • Internet, agile, gtd, portal, programming, software development • 3 comments
Comic Life is great for creating story flows in a rough and ready way, with a little style.
Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups
Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!
Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.
Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.
JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping
iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 Bluetooth tethering results: Less than 1/3 the speed of USB
April 29th, 2009 • Apple, Internet, iPhone • 1 comment
So, it’s rather slower – 96kbps.
To test it, i tried the ThinkBroadband speed tester, (that i successfully used to test USB tethering), but it failed to complete the test.
I then tried the Broadband speed tester site and got the above results, as well as a 74kbps upload speed.
When (if!) i find time, i’ll go digging and find out if there’s an obvious reason for this – it’s clearly shouldn’t be bottlenecked by the performance of BlueTooth, as it should run up to 3 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth)
iPhone 3.0 Beta 4 + iTunes 8.2 Pre-release = USB Tethering Active Again :)
April 29th, 2009 • Apple, Internet, iPhone • No comments
Yep, USB tethering died in Betas 2 and 3, but with iTunes 8.2 Pre-release and Beta 4, all is working again and it feels wonderfully fast. Well, it’s only running at 336.58 Kbps, but it feels great! As a note, i think the fix was actually iTunes rather than iPhone Beta 4.
Lovely 
Now to test the Bluetooth speeds