Charismatic Dog

Hooray Apple. I’ve been wanting to find a good short tutorial for getting up and running with Ruby on Rails. I’ve started on a few of these before but perhaps this one will do the trick. Applescript Studio is still the furthest I’ve gotten with application development outside of TWiki-Apps so it seems fitting to rely on Apple to nudge me into another scripting environment.

Ruby on Rails is a popular and powerful open source web framework for rapidly creating high-quality web applications to help you keep up with the speed of the Web. Rails is thriving on Mac OS X, and Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, Capistrano, Subversion, and other tools that help to streamline the development and deployment of Rails applications. In addition, the Organizer feature of XCode 3.0 keeps your development workflow efficient. This article gives you a full tour of Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Leopard—starting with building a web application using the latest Rails features with Xcode 3.0, and finishing with deploying the application to a production server running Leopard Server. Along the way we’ll explore unique features and benefits that Leopard brings to the party. In the end you’ll be better equipped to consider the advantages of powering your web application with Rail [From Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard]

This was listed all over including Ranchero and Daring Fireball.

I happen to agree with those OS X users who say that one of OS’ great strengths is the ability to load random add-ons with your application, but I have noticed the problems caused by rampant input manager spew in apps that really derive no benefit from what appears to be system-wide modifications. In Leopard Apple has started depreciating various parts of the libraries and functions programmers have used to make these application plugins. You can read some of the upset this has caused over at Unsanity. The SafariStand page is another good example of how bad things have gotten for projects that depend on this infrastructure. A new project called Plugsuit claims to have an answer to both the problem of systemwide stability and the demise of the Input Manager.

Plugsuit’s website claims that it does not use the Input Manager trick to load plugins and instead uses another method to load third party code into individual apps instead of system wide. It’s a good trick and something I’m excited to test.

While I understand concerns others have raised over the years about the stability of input manager hacks, I think it would be a shame to lose even the option to mess with the Mac OS in ways Apple never intended.

They might want to get themselves one of these.

Now here’s an odd bug. Ecto seems to be choking on this one post. Maybe if I start fresh…

I took a shot at updating the ol’ loaner iPhone from work up to 1.1.3. This broke SyncJE good. Boo. So then I tried a different method of Jailbreaking instead of iJailbreak this temporarily bricked the phone.

A trip into restore mode and going back to iJailbreak and I found myself back in business. I then ssh’d into the machine and tried running SyncJE from the command line by cd’ing into /Applications/SyncJE.app/. Oh I also had to chmod +s SyncJE (inside Applications/SynceJE.app/). I then created a directory /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib/ and /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/arm-apple-darwin/lib/ and ran “ln -s /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib” and “ln -s /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/arm-apple-darwin/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib” I also ended up having to add a link between /var/root/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb and /var/mobile/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb

If I’m bored or feel guilty later I’ll clean all of the above up. Meanwhile, good night everybody!

Update: Here are some links related to this quixotic endeavor:

• http://raddysblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/setting-up-proxy-in-apple-iphone.html
• http://nexthaus.com/SyncJe%20for%20iPhone%20quickstart.pdf
• http://www.oscot.com/apple/how-to-make-an-itouch-with-bsd-root-md0-major-2-minor-0-work-again.html
• http://ijailbreak.com/
• http://code.google.com/p/independence/wiki/Beta14KnownIssues
• http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26245
• http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=433598
• http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/issues/detail?id=72

The title should be read out loud in as nasal a voice as you can muster. Think of that Econ prof who drove you nuts talking about supply-side economics.

The good people at The Unofficial Apple Weblog shared this nice little bit from The Street claiming Mac users tend to be liberal snobs. While I’m sure Rush Limbaugh takes umbrage on the first half, it wouldn’t really surprise me to learn there’s a hint of truth to both. Still as TUAW rightly points out, some of the observations are just odd.

Lets run em down and see where I fit. The points they highlighted from the video were that Mac users tend:

• to be perfectionists — Yep. You should’ve seen what this post looked like a few minutes ago.
• to use notebooks — A laptop is worth every extra penny, although keep in mind that I currently wear six hats at work and have two desks but somehow three office locations spread across the U of M Twin Cities’ West and East Bank campuses
• to use teeth whitening products — Actually I’ve been thinking hard about this one lately, but honestly I never even got braces. Seriously you should should not under any circumstances see my bottom row of teeth.
• to drive station wagons — umm… does a Golf count as a wagon?
• to pay for downloaded music — I’m stuck on CD’s still, but it’s true I never got into Napster/Limewire/YourMom/eDonkey
• to go to Starbucks — I’ve been in there it’s true. Nothing on Dunn Bros or Border Town though.
• care about “green” products and the environment — more my wife than me, but she is working away on her new MacBook as I write this. I have to say I enjoy the fact that some of our household cleaners advise that in case of accidental swallowing: drink a glass of water.
• to own a hybrid car — If anyone wants to give me a hybrid, I’d be happy to drive it.
• and last but not least … to buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year — 2007 was a rare year for me in that I bought both work shoes and hiking boots. That would be up from my 0 shoe purchases in 2006 for those keeping score at home. However, I am seriously considering replacing my swing dancin’ shoes this year and I might also be tempted into something as silly as a custom pair of Converse.

I’d additionally add that I am fairly liberal socially and politically but it’s a recent trend and my Republican parents are happy Mac owners themselves. I guess I’d say in general it’s dangerous to generalize and I’ll leave it at that for now.

On a completely unrelated note: ecto + NetNewsWire = happy blog fun time for Drew!

I don’t consider myself a very good photographer. But I am rather proud of this photo of my grandmother-in-law.

BTW: Anyone else impressed that my wife’s grandmother (whose age shall remain unshared) planned and lead a trip for many of her children, grandchildren and various hangers on–that’d be where I fit in –to Glacier National Park?

It was a really cool trip to Glacier and towards the end I got the above shot while we were waiting for a truck to come lead us down the mountain-side (required while the Going to the Sun Road is under some construction) I took this picture. It could probably stand to have the contrast tweaked but I’m happy enough with the raw results to share.

So the new version of ecto is significantly improved over the last version I tested on Mac OS X back when I decided to roll my own blog editor. Seriously I could eventually write a lot of these great features into the old CharismaticDog.app but it’d be nowhere near as fast and I don’t really have the time anymore.

More importantly if I do have the time, I should focus it on adding content to this site or making music.

So far ecto’s new WYSIWYG editor is cruising along nicely:

• bulleted lists
• simple markup
• good toolbar
• nice linking features
• responsive
• pleasant appearance

There’s also a nice preview in the post list view. I’m also going to test it with UThink Blogs.

Update:

I didn’t even think to test images… probably because I’ve been doing without for so long…

It uploaded and thumb-nailed like a champ. About the only thing I could ask for now is some wicked cool js-image-browser-foo to be built in.

I’m still this close to buying an iPhone. I’m going to have to consider my budget carefully. I’ve got a loaner I’m playing with at work and it’s going to be awful tough to see it go when I’m done… Meanwhile I’ve found instructions (linickx.com) for making a Cisco VPN 3k Concentrator work with OS X (regular type and mobile)’s built-in VPN client. They did just introduce a 16gig model…