#mac_osx

[sonicchicken]

github -> hub + git

Over the next few days I'll be trying out hub -- a command line utility to simplify working with github repos via git. On my Mac, this was a super-easy install via homebrew:

brew install hub

Then just add an alias to ~/.bashrc:

alias git=hub

I also set it up to use https by issuing the following bash command:

git config --global hub.protocol https

I haven't used it much yet, but it looks pretty handy. Mostly I just wanted to document how easy it was to install. And, if I need to yank it, what I will need to undo.

[sonicchicken]

yeoman, npm, and osx, oh my!

tl;dr

Do not use sudo npm install -g! Instead, use npm-g_without_sudo.

Still getting EPEERINVALID warnings? Install "missing" peers using npm install --save-dev peer1 peer2...

yeoman was frustrating the hell out of me! Or possibly it was npm (specifically, npm install -g) and homebrew not playing nice. But I think I've fixed everything, and I wanted to make sure I can re-do this if when necessary. (Also wouldn't hurt if I saved somebody the 2+ days I've spent banging my head against the keyboard trying to deal with this!)

So some background... I was trying to set up yeoman for an AngularJS project that I'm working on. Yeoman looks amazing, setting up the application framework and testing, and probably some other goodies that I haven't had time to discover yet. But I kept running into errors and warnings, wanting certain dependencies to be installed globally. I foolishly tried sudo npm install -g some-dependency and cost myself about a day of effort to fix my system. If only I had seen npm-g_without_sudo a little earlier, sigh! But now you are aware of it, and hopefully won't follow in my earlier footsteps, especially if you're on a Mac.

After I had npm and friends installed properly, I was able to make a lot of headway with yeoman. Setting up a new AngularJS app with mkdir newapp && cd newapp && yo angular worked almost flawlessly. I got a warning or two about overwriting package.json, but for these just choose 'overwrite' and you'll be fine. The warnings that were problematic were:

npm WARN EPEERINVALID ...

These started showing up later on, during unit testing. I thought perhaps my npm correction might have fixed this, so I tried updating the npm modules for the project:

$ npm install npm WARN EPEERINVALID [email protected] requires a peer of karma@^0.13.0 || >= 0.14.0-rc.0 but none was installed. npm WARN EPEERINVALID [email protected] requires a peer of jasmine-core@* but none was installed. npm WARN EPEERINVALID [email protected] requires a peer of karma@>=0.9 but none was installed. npm WARN EPEERINVALID [email protected] requires a peer of phantomjs@>=1.9 but none was installed.

Still no luck! I also tried installing the missing peers as globals, but that just took more time (and disk space) and didn't solve the problem.

I finally got everything working by adding the "missing" peers as dev dependencies, via npm install --save-dev jasmine-core karma phantomjs

Working great now, time to resume hacking on Angular!

[sonicchicken]

Make a Dashboard “Web Clip” widget from a web page

The OS X Dashboard is still kicking! One of the handy features of the Dashboard is "web clips", i.e. specific pieces of a web page. Here's how to create one in Safari. (I just test this, and it still works as of Safari 6.1 and OS X 10.7.5)

[sonicchicken]

Apple Xcode, compilers and make and perl, oh my!

Yet another instance of Apple telling me what they are doing, and me failing to pay attention. sigh...

In this case, I recently "upgraded" my system at work, from the 3rd newest to the 2nd newest version of OS X. But after I did so, I lost all my developer tools (compiler, make, perl's CPAN, etc.)

It turns out that all I needed to do was reinstall Xcode, but that's now done via the App Store instead of the interwebz. Also, after installing Xcode, you need to run it so that you can have Xcode install the command line tools.

Go to /Applications/App Store and download/install Xcode

Launch Xcode (Applications/Xcode)

Open Xcode preferences, Downloads, Components.

On the Command Line Tools line, click the "Install" button.

Make sure the command line tools are in your PATH

Steps #1 and #4 take a bit of time, but once they were done I had a config.h and CPAN was working again.

Step #5 might take a little explanation. The command line tools that I was missing were make(1) and cc(1). I thought cc might be a little easier to find, so here's what I did:

$ which cc (nothing returned) $ locate cc | grep /cc$ /Developer/usr/bin/cc $ export PATH="$PATH:/Developer/usr/bin"

The first command verified that my PATH did not include the cc command. The second one (locate) showed me which directory it was in. And the third one added that directory to my PATH for the current session. Once you've verified that your tools are all working, copy that "export PATH..." command to your .bashrc file.

I might have avoided some of this trouble if I had kept up with What's New in Xcode

[sonicchicken]

This guide describes setting up the Arduino programming environment on Mac OS X.

[sonicchicken]

Dave Taylor has a very concise article on using Apple's Safari browser as an RSS reader.

[sonicchicken]

Known hosts' ASCII art

Want to see the ASCII art of all the systems in your ssh known_hosts file? $ ssh-keygen -lv -f ~/.ssh/known_hosts I know this works on recent versions of FreeBSD and Mac OS X. It probably also works on other BSD's and possibly the Linux distros. (Warning: Seeing a whole bunch of cruft in your known_hosts(5) file may cause you to spend considerable time cleaning it up! ;)