Tab completion and syntax hilighting for irb

Frank Spychalski posted how to use wirble to get syntax hiliting and tab completion in irb here.

Time to eat the dog food

Plus, care and feeding of blog software was more pain than it was worth.

New posts are all at http://digitalhominid.apesseekingknowledge.net

New posts are all at http://digitalhominid.apesseekingknowledge.net.

New Butler out for 10.4.1

Peter Maurer has a new beta of Butler out for 10.4.1, here.

Spotlight importer for Python source

The guys over at Toxic Software have released a freeware Spotlight plugin to handle Python source code.

Very sweet, lets you search for stuff in comment strings, function names, all sorts of goodness.

Ruby on Rails & MySQL on Tiger

First, see the previous blog entry to fix your Ruby install to be able to make proper binary extensions. You're going to need to build a mysql extension for Ruby later.

If you haven't already done so, install XCode (it's on the Tiger DVD), and fink. If you've only just installed fink, make sure you do a

fink selfupdate
fink update-all

Those will take a considerable amount of time if you haven't run them before.

Now you need to install MySQL. You can either do it from the bare tarball, or use a package manager like fink or darwinports. I like fink, so do:

fink install mysql mysql-client

and let fink grind away at all the assorted dependencies mysql needs. This will take a while, MySQL is big.

Now that MySQL is installed, we can install rails -

sudo gem install rails

Rails doesn't ship with an adapter for MySQL. We install it like so (this should be one line)

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/sw/lib/mysql --with-mysql-include=/sw/include

so that it can find the mysql libraries fink installed earlier. Note that the -- --with-mysql-include is supposed to be there, that isn't a typo.

You can now go find one of the Rails tutorials like the one Vincent Foley has at http://darkhost.mine.nu:81/~vince/rails/tutorial.html and get started with Rails.

Fix Ruby problem on 10.4

I've wanted to experiment with Ruby on Rails (the same technology behind Backpack) for a while now, but ran into a problem when I tried to install it on my 10.4 machine. Rails installs with gem, no problem, but I couldn't get gem to build the external libraries Ruby needs to interact with MySQL.

Fortunately, the kind folks at technoblog made a script that does all the fixes you need to get your Tiger Ruby to properly make binary libraries.

Tiger Mail cleanup

When you upgrade from Panther to Tiger, Mail converts the old format mbox files & indexes to .elmx files and spotlight indexing. To be safe, it doesn't delete the old files in case you want to roll back. It also doesn't update them though, so they're kind of worthless spacewasters.

Here's a list of commands to clear out the Panther grime. Make sure you have a backup of ~/Library/Mail, of course. Each line starting with find should be a separate command in a Terminal window.


find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.imapmbox/Cached*" -exec rm -v '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/mbox" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.*mbox/content_index" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'

find ~/Library/Mail -path "*.mbox/table_of_contents" -exec rm -frv '{}' ';'


Running this saved me 3G of disk space.

If you don't make a backup before running this and this nukes your email, it's your fault.

Nice Advanced Spotlight Tutorial

ScribeNT has a nice tutorial up on how to use the advanced query features in Spotlight at http://www.scribent.com/osx/xtip/comments/tiger_spotlight1/.

He covers stuff like using the Raw Query option to do boolean searches like "files with X but not Y" that you can't do easily from the simple query window.

Broadcast Flag Redux

Hollywood is trying to get legislation passed to reduce the functionality of HDTV. They want to be able to mark shows as unrecordable so we can't timeshift them any more.

The EFF has more information about this, and a form to automatically fax your congressman here.