Mark Pilgrim, Former Apple User, Is Not At All Bitter

Installing MySQL on Ubuntu (the NSFW way) [dive into mark] — a response to Installing MySQL on OS X

But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. But please, please stay up to date with MySQL security patches; I wasn’t kidding about that, it’s really fucking important.

OS X and Ubuntu: Waves of Dissatisfaction

Despite Leopard being new and shiny and wonderful, I’m terribly discontent with it. The biggest reason seems to be the huge amount of Macports breakage. I can’t build Haskell to play with it, but that’s fairly trivial. It’s not like that’s anything but an intellectual curiosity thing. But I also can’t build the GIMP, which is actually something I use with some frequency. It’s because MacPorts had finally, during the extra year and a half that the delayed release of Leopard had given them, gotten everything just singing together. Everything built right and correctly and worked together.

Then Leopard arrives and the breakage begins.

It’s like there’s this wave of “works-right-ness” that ebbs and flows. When a new version of OS X comes out, then much of the cool open source software I love gets broken on it, hopelessly, certainly beyond my ability to fix. At this point, (Ubuntu) Linux looks better because a ton of things work there that don’t on OS X. As time goes on, things get fixed and fixed and fixed on OS X until it’s on an equal footing with regards to open source stuff building correctly, and at this point OS X looks better than Linux because of its general professionalism and ease of use and smoothness.

There’s a second wave in there related to Ubuntu releases but because they happen every 6 months instead of every one to two-and-a-half years, it’s a smaller, less disruptive wave.

UPDATE: They fixed Gimp. (Well, they fixed glib2, which was the source of the problems.) Good-o. :)

Gimpin with MacPorts

I want to blog about this and I realize that I basically never write about anything but politics anymore, so it’s kind of weird and out of place. Oh well.

I found out recently about this cool gimp plugin I wanted to try. I use a precompiled Mac version of The Gimp, called “Gimp.app.” I tried to use the various goodies inside it to compile the plugin, with no success. I’d have to compile my own copy of the Gimp to get it to work. And that way lies madness… so many dependencies, so many things that could go wrong… no, wait! I can always use MacPorts! MacPorts is a project to maintain an interdependent system of open source software packages that compile correctly together on OS X. The gimp is available there.

But it wouldn’t compile. I discovered that I’d let my install of macports get pretty out of date. I had to update MacPorts itself, and then do upgrades of all my installed software to the various latest and greatest versions. I had trouble installing one package, sqlite3, because I had installed a copy of it by hand, separately from macports, at one time, and there were a couple files left over interfering with building the new one.

Sadly the version of the Gimp included in macports seems to have a lot of requirements, all kinds of gnome stuff. (I learned just now that you can build it using a “without_gnome” variant. Too late. All the dependencies are already built. Oh well. :)

All this for a silly little plugin…

RE: Rails, It Turns Out I’m Just an Idiot, Not A Moron

Or vice versa.

About a week ago I wrote and deleted a fairly whiny post about how I was trying to write a simple Rails application and just didn’t get it. I mean, I could generate scaffolding and stuff, like any chimp could, but every time I tried to do anything in the least bit off-the-beaten path, I’d end up in a morass.

Having taken a little time off I started messing around with a simple rails app again, and needed to look something up, and I couldn’t find it in the api documentation or googling around, so I grabbed my ancient (1st edition) Agile Web Development with Rails book, and checked out the index. Ah, there was what I needed, on page X Y and Z.

In the midst of reading those pages I realized I had never really taken advantage of that book at all.

See, the first umpteen chapters of the book are a tutorial, where you follow along, they say do this and do that, and you are supposed to go “wow, it sure looks easy, of course, I’m not learning anything except what to do if I happen to want to build exactly what they are building in the tutorial example.”

I’d only made it through a few chapters before tossing the book aside as useless, because that sort of thing doesn’t help me at all. I can’t follow along and not understand what’s going on. I want to know what’s going on, how things work, first, and then I may be able to get something useful out of an example or tutorial.

There is basically no useful way (for me at least) to learn Rails on the web. All you have are these whizz-bang follow-along tutorials, which don’t ever give you a complete picture of what’s going on, and the API documentation, which is useful as a reference but horribly painful to try to learn from. It’s hell or high water — either handwaving la-la on the one hand, or details so nitty-gritty that you’ve got to be a lot more of a propellerhead than I am to use them for learning.

Anyone who’s got the Rails book I mentioned can already see why I’m an idiot. It turns out that the latter half of the book, after all that whizz-bang la-la tutorial, is exactly what I needed. It sets out very clearly and comprehensibly what all the various parts of Rails are, how they fit together, what you can do with them, giving you enough details to clearly understand what you can do with each piece, but organizing those details into a comprehensible presentation.

And I’ve owned this book the whole time and I didn’t realize that it contained exactly what I needed to have to learn Rails.

So I’m not a moron who can’t learn what’s supposed to be the easiest web framework in the world in my favorite language in the world, I’m an idiot who was trying to learn it with all the wrong resources. Or vice versa.

I’m glad I got that sorted out.

Antisocial Bookmark Tagging Extension

Bookmark Tags, a Firefox extension, is all the awesomeness of tagged bookmark storage a la del.ico.us, without the hassle of your bookmarks being on someone else’s computer instead of your own, and without sharing your hard-earned bookmarks with the undeserving masses.

I just installed it, so I can’t say whether or not it is great in the long run, but it looks promising.

I’ve pretty much given up on using any other browser than Firefox. There are very good alternatives available on the mac, but I can’t live without my extensions.