Two Dimensional World

Lou Kosak's day dreams about web development, clouds, curmudgeonly letters to companies, talking pictures. @hoverkraft on Twitter. See also: yugster.tumblr.com.

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Getting Nokogiri to install after upgrading to Mountain Lion

I just upgraded to Mountain Lion and was seeing this deprecation warning:

So instead of leaving it well enough alone, I decided I had to uninstall nokogiri and reinstall it with bundler. When I tried to run bundle, I got this ugly message:

There's basically no info about this on the internets anywhere, as far as I can tell. I tried a bunch of stuff that people mentioned (https://gist.github.com/3177887, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6802410/warning-nokogiri-was-built-against-libxml-version-2-7-8-but-has-dynamically-lo) but none of it seemed to be working. After digging around forever, I got it working by doing the following:

Installed Xcode 4.4

Installed the command line tools via Xcode preferences > Install

Installed XQuartz 2.7.2 (from xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki)

Whittled around for 45 minutes reading ruby's mkmf.rb, etc.

And finally,

rvm uninstall 1.9.3

rvm install 1.9.3

Looks like ruby just needed to be rebuilt with whatever the Xcode environment on 10.8 is -- after that it installed just as happy as you please.

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Fixing the OS X Lion Terminal zshell pwd bug

(I wonder what percentage of mac users this represents, and whether or not I'd need to use scientific notation to represent that number.)

So, IF you're running OS X Lion, and IF you use the terminal frequently, and IF you use zshell (which you probably should, but nobody does) THEN this might interest you.

Basically there's a bug with the terminal's "New tabs open with 'Same Working Directory'" problem, that also affects restoring a terminal window, where the correct PWD (..present working directory..) isn't received from zshell and the terminal ends up opening in /private/var (...for some reason.)

Here's the fixeroo, snatched from this superuser answer. Drop the following into your ~/.zshrc:

# Set Apple Terminal.app resume directory if [[ $TERM_PROGRAM == "Apple_Terminal" ]] && [[ -z "$INSIDE_EMACS" ]] { function chpwd { local SEARCH=' ' local REPLACE='%20' local PWD_URL="file://$HOSTNAME${PWD//$SEARCH/$REPLACE}" printf '\e]7;%s\a' $PWD_URL } chpwd }

And be merry forevermore.

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My letter to Venmo

(I just forwarded one of Venmo's weekly "update" emails back to them with a couple thoughts.)

Dear Venmo,

Just wanted to say--I appreciate what you're trying to do with "social payments" but the automated weekly email telling me which friends and acquaintances had some kind of transaction is starting to seem pretty silly. I like the radical transparency idea, assuming that's what you're going for, but if that's the case you need to either a) start pushing people to disclose actual transaction sums to their social graph or b) figure out some other way to make it interesting and/or useful. (Product tie-ins? Additional story-style information? Photos of the events being repaid?)

You could also decide that providing a really easy, much less annoying way to Pay your Pals online is differentiation enough and that maybe people don't need to have a digest email telling them that "Janey Johnson paid Bully Bopkins for toothpaste". Speaking as somebody trying to turn an existing business model "social", well, not everything needs to be.

Sincerely,

Lou Kosak Pinchit.com

The email in question:

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Hating on Eclipse

This article is interesting. Comparison of developing for iOS and Android, including a proto howto to switching from one to the other. Winning line is about Google recommended Java IDE of choice:

You’re going to just hate Eclipse. You’re going to hate it with the heat of a thousand suns. It’s going to feel slow and bloated and it won’t taste like real food.

As a former Eclipse user, I agree unconditionally. Not real food.

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Calibrating your Macbook display for fun and profit

I first found this video when I had just purchased a new 15" Macbook Pro and was noticing that the screen was worse than the several year old Macbook it was replacing. Everything was overexposed and it was hard to read text, etc. Turns out all it needed was a custom color calibration, and this is true of basically every mac laptop screen (and most others I'm sure, but it's easier to notice on Mac laptops because the screens are so nice.

Take the time to do this. It's not some obscure nerd stuff (I mean it sort of is, but everyone I've ever showed how to do it noticed the difference and was super appreciative of the improvement).

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Switching to ZSH

My friend Kyle mentioned to me that he was on a mission to switch to zshell a few days ago, and it got me thinking. I've been ignoring that kind of call of the wild shell customization stuff for years, bashing my head against /bin/bash, assuming that if there were something better, everybody would already be using it, right? Turns out there is, and people are (well, the people willing to take the time to figure it out, anyway).

I googled it up and found this "so you're thinking of .. " post: http://friedcpu.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/zsh-the-last-shell-youll-ever-need/. He makes the case well, so you should probably just go read it. HOWEVER. His .zshrc config is the craziest crap I've ever seen, and it should actually be published as a novel. Because it's so goddamn long.

So if you're looking for a simpler jumping off point, scope the ~lkosak/.zshrc, which should make things a little easier. It turns on all the stuff that makes zsh worth switching to, without throwing you into a kaleidoscopic whirlwind from which you will never return. Anyway the general consensus seems to be, build up your little zshell house over time, brick by brick (or in one frantic, heroin-fueled weekend, as the traditionalists prefer). If you grab a giant zshrc from somebody and jump into the deep end, well, who knows where you're gonna end up.

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Bookmarklet to load jQuery (for firebug/chrome developer tools)

Load jQuery (drag this to your bookmark bar)

The link above is actually a little JS bookmarklet that will load (as in, inject) jQuery in noConflict mode into whatever page you're on when you click it. This will let you use the full jQuery framework on whatever page you want using your JS console of choice (i.e. Firebug, Chrome Developer Tools, Safari "Error Console", etc.).

Then you can do fun stuff like:

jQuery(".eventInviteLayout input[type=checkbox]").click() (Select all friends in the "Invite Friends" popup for a facebook event).