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After upgrading to Snow Leopard I had quite a bit of trouble with my MacPorts installation, since most builds just failed with configure errors. After the obvious first steps of installing a newer version for SL and making sure I have the most recent XCode, I was a bit stumped until I finally found this site:

Migrating a MacPorts install to a new major OS version or CPU architecture

After finding this guide – which btw really solved my problems – I felt a bit stupid, but since I didn’t have to do anything after the Tiger->Leopard upgrade, I really didn’t expect this.

Clojure definitely is one of the hottest new programming languages around and just recently hit a very important milestone. Setting up a nice Clojure development environment on OS X still can be a bit of a pain though, which can be seen by the number of HOWTOs and installation notes floating around on the web. I therefore decided to expand one of those into ClojureX, which I believe is the easiest way to get up to speed with Clojure development on Leopard.

ClojureX can

• download and build the source code for Clojure, clojure-contrib and JLine (a readline like library for Java)
• download editor support packages for TextMate and Emacs
• create a symlink for the Clojure startup script in /usr/local/bin
• install support for TextMate via the clojure-tmbundle
• configure Emacs to use clojure-mode, Slime and swank-clojure
• keep your Clojure installation up to date via a simple “git submodule update && ant”

I hope this will come in handy for other people interested in trying out Clojure on Mac OS X, if you have any feedback please post it in the comment section.

• Step 1: Download Fluid, an awesome little application to create site specific browsers.
• Step 2: Find some online API documentation. For Ruby I recommend railsapi.com or RubyBrains.
• Step 3: Create your app in Fluid:

Here’s an example screenshot of a site specific browser for RubyBrain.com:

Of course this still requires you to have a working internet connection, but you could always use a local version of the API docs when creating the app. On a related note you should also check out Goo which is a nice alternative to gem server on OS X.

As we all know posting code to Moodle (the software that powers RubyLearning) can be a bit cumbersome. I therefore created a TextMate command which will

• take the currently active file
• replace all occurrences of < with the HTML-entity
• wrap all of that in [code ruby] tags and
• copy it to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into the forums.

Source:

Download:
RubyLearning.tmCommand

A couple of days ago I decided that I want to play around with Rubinius, so I cloned the source from GitHub and thought I was ready to go. As it turned out that wasn’t quite the case, since my first attempt to build it ended in the second error can see here:

I hopped into #rubinius to find out if more people have this problem, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. At least I learnt that most active develop is going into the ‘stackfull’ branch, so I did a ‘git checkout origin/stackfull’ and gave the build another try, which resulted in the first error message you see above.

Determined not to give up, I decided to try one last time with ‘rake vm:clean’ and ‘rake build:debug’ and to my surprise ended up with a working Rubinius install

$ bin/rbx -v
rubinius 0.11.0-dev (ruby 1.8.6) (f5260b581 12/31/2009) [i686-apple-darwin9.6.0]

That made me somewhat curious, so I tried ‘rake vm:clean’ and ‘rake build’ which now also worked (still can’t build master though). I have to admit that I’m slightly confused, but at least I have a working Rubinius version to play around with for the time being.