While reading the The Unofficial Apple Weblog today I noticed this sweet little Jack-O-Lantern screensaver for OS X. After some feedback on the 757.rb group, I decided to make some Code-O-Lanterns.

Follow the instructions for the Jack-O-Lantern screensaver on where to put the carving files. If you are not on a Mac, I have taken some screen shots that you can use for desktop pictures. If you would like to see a code o lantern that is not up... just ask for one, providing it has a logo!

I've been a TextMate user for a long time now and I'm still finding new things to do with it. Here recently I wanted to use the RubyAMP TextMate Bundle and was a little miffed to find that it was pointing to my OS X system ruby. The error message looked something like this when it went looking for my ruby/gems.

No such file to load -- appscript (LoadError) from 
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require’
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require’
...

Well this is working out well so far. I'm really liking the Passenger (mod_rails for Apache) extension. Right now I have this Mephisto site running it and it seems to be doing really well. Also, most people do not do this, but I run a full development stack Apache/MongrelCluster to mimic production boxes the best way I can. Now I am running mod_rails on all my development hosts.

Some Things I Like

• I do not have to fuss with OS X launchd startup scripts for my mongrels, just Apache.
• Typically in a high volume site that runs mongrel behind an Apache proxy balancer, will get a large timeout and proxy error even if the mongrels are immediately available. Passenger has a nice way to restart the app, just touch the tmp/restart.txt file.

Some Things I'm Waiting For

• The RailsEnv can not be set per virtual host. You have to set RAILS_ENV = 'development' in each app if you want to run mixed virtual hosts with different environments.
• Normally I would pass environment variables to the console when issuing mongrel cluster starts. I would really love to see Passenger support apache environment variables.

My MacBook is about a year old now and I've read in quite a few places that they could be upgraded to around 3.3GB of memory for this specific model. Unlike the latest MacBook which can "as advertised" accommodate 4GB of memory, the theory was that the Santa Rosa chipset can address all 4GB. It could very well be that technically my MacBook is only using ~3.3GB of that memory but the performance has been significant for a very cheap stick of RAM. I highly recommend Crucial.

I think this upgrade will have to hold me for some time. In general it has really helped my uptime. Odd as that is I think working with only 2GB of memory caused a lot of IO swap and memory corruption. Especially when stopping and starting so many different mongrels for local Rails development. As of this writing I have not found an issue that I have had to reboot for... uptime 10 days and going strong.

To keep my uptime going strong, I just purchased an app called iFreeMem today after reading about it on TUAW. Because I use PhotoShop ever now and then it really helped having this utility free up some memory that it would not release. So far it is working great!

Well this is far beyond cool but highly functional, a Quake like terminal implementation of Terminal.app that is a HotKey away from within any application. A friend turned me on to this after it showed up on the Monday morning Apple links post from arstechnica.com. Although I have never thought of this idea, it seems to have been a popular request for quite some time and after a public request, the author of QuickSilver stepped up to the challenge and coded this little goodie using the application enhancer method called SIMBL which was created by Mike Solomon, the creator of the PithHelmet plugin for Safari.

I have not been a black Mac owner since I got rid of my Lombard (aka the Bronze Keyboard) way back in 2001. Before that, I was the proud owner of a 3400c which was also black and one of the first PowerPC laptops offered from Apple. That PowerBook cost me close to $4,000 if memory serves and I swear some of the debt is still hanging around today! So after being with Apple for so long I have very glad that good Mac hardware has gotten cheaper over the past 4 years and to see the return of a the darker colored books. Its about time too and the price is just right.

Tim Toady tells us that (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) and I am sure this is not the first and not likely the last blog post you will ever see that tells you the best way to install RAILS on OS X. Some people would just rather than go the simple path but I implore you, do it this way. Gaining the experience of compiling your own software will help you down the road when it comes time for doing more advanced things, especially deploying your RAILS app. When you are done, you will have a rock solid deployment environment for RAILS that will include: