Everything old is new again.  Again.

Steven Rosenbaum in Forbes:

Why is YouTube making this change? Well, there’s a clue if you look back at the roots of MTV. In the early days, the music video channel was popular as it played short music videos. The problem: the coin of the relm for TV advertising was (and is) the Neilsen ratings, which are reported on the half hour.  Ergo, folks channel surfing in-and-out of MTV weren’t showing up on the meter. MTV’s shift toward program blocks, and then programs, was driven by a need to show up on the ratings – and to attract advertisers.

I have no idea if Apple is going to develop "iVideo" or anything else, but I thought this was an incredibly interesting point.  Advertisers can't sink their teeth into people popping in and out of something.  It makes sense that Hulu has been able to attract a wider cadre of legit advertisers than YouTube.

http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/04/20/apple-building-a-youtube-killer/

Jackson Hole style.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Truth (not just the iPhone):

Cell phones don’t work. Everyone knows they don’t work. If you’re young you never knew when phones worked. I mean to me these phones now, they’re like the phones in Italy in the sixties, you know, which didn’t work. Well then you said the Italians, their phones don’t work but they had the renaissance so we had to forgive them for that. But now every phone is like that, okay? No one cares. They so wanted a phone that you could walk around with all that time that they don’t care if it works or not. If people buy things before they work, they’re not going to finish inventing them. They never work.

What if Thomas Edison said like, "Well I have a lightbulb that works one second and then it doesn’t work ... "? He finished inventing the lightbulb and they work. I mean every single company has a whole department that fixes computers because they break all the time, not occasionally. They break. "Can they do this?" "No the computer’s down." … You can call it "down," but isn’t that the same as broken? I mean this isn’t true of old things. When they broke you said they broke. But it was not built into the thing to break. So, should they actually become simple enough to use, I’m sure I will use them, you know? I’m not saying that I have anything against them, it’s just that they’re machines. That’s it. I see that and I know that it’s changed everything, unfortunately it’s not changed the human being which is just as poor a species as it ever was.

via The Vulture interview

 

I'm going to start blogging again.  Starting now.  With Posterous.

C'mon in!

Amazing sunset from calistoga wine country.

*Underexposed via Photoshop Mobile, taken with my iPhone

So yeah, by now you may be aware Ivy's bike and my bike got stolen out of the safe confines of our garage.

I'm seeing if a twitter storm might be able to solve our problem (or if I can even brew a storm). When we filed the police report, they said these types of things often get sold directly on Market street and then pawned off. Mine is a 2008 Roubaix Comp and hers is a 2008 Tarmac Comp. We got them 4 months ago and were planning on using these for the AIDS Lifecycle, but will now doubtfully be able to participate. So, double :( :(

If you see bikes that look somewhat like this either being ridden by a homeless guy or in a pawn shop, give me a call at 415-385-7972 or find me @mavenroger.

RIP bikes...hopefully you'll find someone who uses you.

Batman ears...

Well, as usual, I thought a minor headache would stay minor, but it turned into a migraine.  Like many robust Rails apps, Mavenlink has quite a few gem dependencies and my upgrade to Snow Leopard required me to rebuild quite a few things.  What I've seen online seems to be a lot of one-off issues and 'getting rails running under SL,' but nobody has tackled the big update.

In Tarantino-esque style, where I'll show you the end before we start, here were the gems I needed to update:

mongrel 1.1.5

MySQL 2.7.3 => 2.8.1

taf2-curb 0.3.5.0 => 0.5.2.0

rmagick 2.9.1 => 2.11.1

nokogiri 1.3.1 => 1.3.3

As someone without gobs of rails experience, the news to me was that some of these gems are compiled based on your architecture and the dead giveaway is an error message similar to, or matching "...no matching architecture in universal wrapper..." in your stack trace on any of your gems upon script/server-ing.

Here was my process and a bunch of the resources that helped me and some of the things I needed to do to get my dependencies updated:

Install XCode

First, as these posts point out, you absolutely, positively have to reinstall XCode to get GCC 64-bit rocking, otherwise you won't be able to compile anything (i.e. your gems):

http://www.curtismchale.ca/tutorials/getting-macports-and-git-working-on-snow...

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/30/upgrading-to-snow-leopard

Don't do what I started to do before reading many of these posts (i.e. download it) - it's on your Snow Leopard DVD. You will find it in the Optional Installs dir.  Install takes about 15-20 minutes and I didn't have to uninstall the old XCode.  YMMV.

Install MySQL 64bit

Next, I wasn't having any issues with MySQL, but Matt Aimonetti (above rubyonrails.org blog) recommends an upgrade.  I did that by going to the MySQL download site http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#macosx-dmg and getting from a mirror.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, they were all linked to an older version and I ended up having to Google it to find a download, but you want the newest x86_64bit version.  Install the DB, then the StartupItem then the prefPane, all by double clicking.  I had to restart to get my old install to die and the new one started.

Not bad yet, right?  Just the usual Mac installation stuff.  No Advil required.

WEBrick???

Consider this the Pulp Fiction foot massage scene - kind of random and a foreshadowing of things to come.  In Tarantino's case, his documented foot fetish.  In our case, odd behaviors and, therefore, headaches.

When trying to restart script/server, I noticed that it was trying to start under WEBrick, but not necessarily erroring.  I use mongrel.  Fortunately, the fix was pretty easy.  I started reading about people uninstalling mongrel, etc.  I found that unecessary - just:

$ sudo gem install mongrel

That did the trick for me.

First Volley of Gems

At this point, you can definitely install the new MySQL gem.  Check out these directions, which helped clarify it for me:

http://norbauer.com/notebooks/code/notes/snow-leopard-upgrading-for-rails-dev...

If you want to skip ahead, I just did this:

$ sudo gem uninstall mysql

$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

You're also ready to update taf2-curb if you've got it installed.  I'm using pauldix-feedzirra, which requires taf2-curb, so that's my dependency.  This was really straightforward after I realized I needed to update my gem sources.  Since taf2-curb is on GitHub, you need that in your sources.

$ gem sources

if you don't see "http://gems.github.com" in the output, run

$ sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

then you can

$ sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install taf2-curb

(if you don't have github in your sources, you'll get: "Error: Could not find taf2-curb locally or in a repository!")

MacPorts, or Headaches with Nokogiri

I pray this will help you, because this was where the real migraine kicked in for me.  I did the MacPorts update/upgrade/reinstall like everyone was saying in some of my earlier links to the overview posts.  However, I just could not get Nokogiri installed.  If this looks familiar, you are probably at this step:

[RubyGems:stderr] ERROR:  Error installing nokogiri:    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

...

checking for xmlParseDoc() in -lxml2... nolibxml2 is missing.  try 'port install libxml2' or 'yum install libxml2'*** extconf.rb failed ***Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack ofnecessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for moredetails.  You may need configuration options.

The key for me was "try 'port install libxml2'" in the above trace.  Reading that made me think it was a MacPorts issue and I was doing something wrong.

I read this about 10 times before I had the "aha":

http://groups.google.com/group/nokogiri-talk/browse_thread/thread/bd996cee8c3...

If you notice, in Joe C's last post, he says he did a clean install of SL, XCode, etc and THEN did a nokogiri install.  Nowhere in his list does he have MacPorts installed.  I took a crack at uninstalling MacPorts completely after all my upgrade machinations, etc and the nokogiri gem installed!

Check out this site for uninstalling MacPorts:

http://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#uninstall

I ran the first 2 commands.

RMagick

Now, you're ready for RMagick/ImageMagick.  Go here, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, and run Solomon's script:

http://onrails.org/articles/2009/09/04/rmagick-from-source-on-snow-leopard

This was the easiest thing I did all day and was wayyy easier than going through MacPorts, etc as I did for ImageMagick/RMagick last time.  It worked right out of the box for me, YMMV.

Obviously, download it, chmod 777 it, ./ it.

Fin

So, that was a few hours out of my day - hopefully this saves somebody the same headaches I had.  Please let me know through comments if this helps or if there are any additions/corrections based on your mileage that I should make.

I still haven't reinstalled MacPorts and I'm wondering if I'll be running into future issues.  If people have thoughts, let me know.  I notice every site that I've linked to has that installation as part of the base upgrade to Snow Leopard.

I don't know about anyone else, but this was always really annoying for me. I'd be in a folder and want to search it for a document or file, but Finder would default to searching my entire Mac. What I really wanted was to just search this folder for what I need (much like contextual search in any other app like iTunes).

 Snow Leopard to the rescue!

 Go to Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and change the default to in the dropdown to "Search the Current Folder" as in the below screenshot. Done!

Then, breathe a sigh of relief.

It's been widely reported that Snow Leopard takes up less space - about 5gb in most cases. I just got 16gb extra, but it's not because I'm using less. It appears that the overall capacity is reported differently. The 'real' gain is more like 2gb because of usage and 14gb because of the capacity increase.
 
I just googled and found this article that explains more:
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/22247/
 
I thought it was interesting...

UPDATE: Changed all figures to gb instead of mb - good catch @robolson!