Kyle Mathews ~ Random Thoughts and Excuses

I haven’t done a blog post in months and this will be my first post of the year so far. I don’t think it’s fair to do short posts on a blog and I just haven’t had the time to write about anything so far. Because of this, I find Twitter such a perfect fit for me right now. Short, quick little posts about what I’m doing or thinking about throughout my day. I may still blog when I see the need, but for now you can find me on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/kmathews

Now that Rails 2.0 is out. I thought I’d share this command line script I found for moving your .rhtml template files over to the new .html.erb extensions in your Subversion repository. All one line, just run this in the root of your app. If you aren’t using Subversion, and you should be, you can just remove the svn from the command and do a straight mv command. Sorry Windows users.

for f in $(find . -name *.rhtml) ; do g=$(dirname $f)/$(basename $f .rhtml).html.erb ; svn mv $f $g ; done

Ouch, looks like November came and went pretty fast.

Well anyway, I had read all about the Guest Account feature that comes with Mac OS X Leopard, but finally got to put it to good use today. The Guest Account allows yourself or someone to use your computer and when you log out, all files and settings are automatically reset to the defaults. This is a great way to share your computer with someone, or in my case, use it to troubleshoot an email issue that someone was having. I no longer have to add test accounts to my Mail preferences and worry about cleaning out the Inbox afterwards. Once I was done, I simply logged out and didn’t have to worry about it again. Just make sure you don’t logout until you are completely finished with what you are working on.

Back to work.

I’m posting more about Leopard and OS X now, so maybe I should start a new category sometime soon.

Anyway, if you want to change the default background at the login screen, Leopard has made it even easier. Just replace the jpeg in /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg and you’re all set.

Well it didn’t take long, but I just renewed my .Mac account last night. I wasn’t going to keep it, but the new features that come with Leopard for .Mac are just too good to pass up. WebDAV is easy enough to setup on my own server, but iDisk is better integrated with OS X and the offline syncing for my laptop is great. Combine that with the better syncing between multiple computers and the new Back to My Mac and I’m all in.

I’m also getting 10 times the storage from when I had an account before. Now I just wish you didn’t need to share it with your .Mac email account. Maybe someday.

Note: Rails is really on Leopard, so I thought I would reverse the entire thing.

One little thing you may run into with Leopard and Rails is that it comes with a great list of starter gems to work with, except the MySQL C Bindings. To install these you need to run the following command:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Yes you read that correctly, the -- -- in the command before with-mysql-config= is not a typo.

In addition, you also need the Ruby header files for any gem that needs to be compiled. I ran into this while trying to build Rcov also. You can find the header files on the Optional Installs / Xcode Tools directory on the Leopard DVD.

Looks like it didn’t take long for someone to figure this one out. I think the new dock looks great, but if you upgrade to OS X Leopard and find that you don’t like the new 3-d dock then you may enjoy this. One thing I do like better about this 2-d dock is how much easier it is to see if an app is running. I’m surprised Apple never changed this from the developer preview earlier this year.

I started a new group in my Flickr account for some of my favorite photos. This is just a start, but I’ll be adding more to this later.

This is a great idea. I may have to get one of these for my iPhone if it was real.

hideapod.com

I’ve been following the development with Edge Rails, but I thought I’d post something now that the official preview has been released. Rails 2.0 has a nice set of new features and a good bit of weight lost by moving various elements into optional plugins. I’m going to start moving my apps over to it now that the release is closer.

Read more about 2.0 on the Rails blog