Raymond Law

TSA stupidity on Macbook Air

Seriously, TSA is just wasting the government’s (hence our tax) money and does not provide much in return. They are known to harrass regular traverlers. I was once a victim while traveling on work. I wrote an essay about it but am not sure if I should post it…

FUCK TSA!

Apparently, the Macbook Air is known to disappear into thin air... LOL

Apple announces the Time Capsule today at Macworld 2008.

I returned an Airport Extreme 2 months ago because it kept dropping my Macbook after waking from sleep w/o power plugged in. It was a very frustrating experience, so I went back to the DI-524, although it also drops my Macbook whenever I turned on my Wii. But I only have to turn Airport off and on and it works again. The Airport Extreme worked for 30 seconds, then I turned it off/on, worked for another 30 seconds, turned off/on,... The firmware is a piece of junk.

Now if Time Capsule does not have the same problem with Airport Extreme, I will probably get one to replace my crappy NAT and get a 500GB HD for Time Machine.

Airport Extreme $180 500GB HD ~$100

So Time Capsule is priced much more reasonable than the Macbook Air, but only if it actually works and doesn’t drop connections.

Apple announces Macbook Air today at Macworld 2008.

At first, the coolness factor had me regretting not waiting to delay my Macbook purchase, but after learning that $1799 only has the 4200rpm 80GB HD and you have to shell out $3098 for a 64GB SSD. I am relieved :)

However, seeing it come out of an envelope was extremely cool. I do dislike the black keys a bit tho. I thought making the whole thing aluminum would be more cool. Biege => black => white => aluminum => black. Huh?

I recently got the new Santa Rosa Macbook with Leopard pre-installed and I need to set up the Rails development environment.

Basically there are 3 ways to achieve that:

1. Locomotive

Locomotive method is simple and self contained. It works very well for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. However, the author acknowledges that Locomotive may not be Leopard ready.

2. Rails comes with Leopard

That’s right. Apple has included Rails by default, as noted by DHH. This sounds great. However, that means you will also have to manually install Imagick, RMagick, and all those other stuff that you need for development. Also, it may be harder to upgrade Ruby or Rails when new versions come out. You probably need to install from source to upgrade or what not…

3. MacPorts

You might already have your Rails environment set up using MacPorts. If that’s the case, why not just use that? Even if you are like me with a fresh installed Leopard, MacPorts still has its advantages. For example, you can use MacPorts to upgrade ruby in the future.

I used MacPorts to set up my Rails environment based on these other great articles:

• Teabass
• Robby on Rails
• Michael Biven
• Tobias Ebnöther

1. Install the latest Xcode version for Leopard. Download from the Apple website.

2. Install the latest MacPorts version for Leopard. Download from the MacPorts website.

Run this to update MacPorts:

sudo port selfupdate

3. Install Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails.

sudo port install ruby
sudo port install rb-rubygems
sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails -y

4. Install MySQL (directly from Andrew Nesbitt, shown here for completeness).

sudo port install mysql5 +server
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist
sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db5
cd /opt/local ; sudo /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqld_safe &
sudo ln -s /opt/local/var/run/mysql5/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

5. Install mongrel and mongrel_cluster.

sudo gem install mongrel
sudo gem install mongrel_cluster

6. Install memcached.

sudo port install memcached
sudo gem install memcache-client

Create a file called /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.danga.memcached.plist, and insert the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.danga.memcached</string>
        <key>OnDemand</key>
        <false/>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/opt/local/bin/memcached</string>
                <string>-d</string>
                <string>-m</string>
                <string>64</string>
                <string>-u</string>
                <string>www</string>
                <string>-p</string>
                <string>11211</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

In order to launch memcached on boot, enter this in the terminal:

sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.danga.memcached.plist

7. Install ImageMagick and RMagick

sudo port install ImageMagick
sudo gem install rmagick

NEW! There are now instructions on how to install ImageMagick and RMagick.

8. Optional – I found out if you have the loaded_plugins gem installed, you may see the following error when running script/console:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-1.4.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:477:in `const_missing':NameError: uninitialized constant Gem::Version::NUM_RE

The reason is MacPorts create two directories to store the RubyGems stuff in /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby and /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby. Ruby’s $LOAD_PATH looks in site_ruby first but the version.rb in site_ruby does not define Gem::Version::NUM_RE whereas the version.rb in vendor_ruby does. I’ve outlined the issue here. So I simply swap them:

sudo mv /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby_tmp
sudo mv /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby
sudo mv /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby_tmp /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby

This fixes the error and everything runs well for me, but I would like to hear the experts out there about why there are separate vendor_ruby and site_ruby.

That’s it. Hope you find this helpful and please report any problems.

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I picked up the AirPort Extreme Base Station with Gigabit Ethernet and the wireless Mighty Mouse from the Apple stores with their “just ok” Black Friday sales.

I have experienced a lot of connection drops with the Airport extreme. The thing keeps dropping the wireless connections at random frequent intervals, rendering it useless. I had to reset and reconfigured it for it to pick up again. Also, the Airport Utility cannot always find the base station. When that happens, time for a reset.

I was hoping to replace the DI-524, but I guess that has to wait a little longer until Apple has either a firmware or hardware fix. This piece of junk is going back to Apple. Disappointed.

On another hand, the mouse works pretty well with the Macbook.

I ordered a white Santa Rosa white Macbook (comes with Leopard at 2.2GHz) from Amazon with $75 rebate and it took them a week to begin shipping on 11/19, but it arrived on 11/21, just in time for me to explore it over the Thanksgiving break.

Here’s what I think: So far so good. This is my first Mac, as well as my first Apple product :) I am happy that Amazon puts the Macbook in another brown box so that my Macbook box does not look trashy when it arrived. So kudos to Amazon. They are really a great place to shop at, as well as Newegg.

The box opening experience was cool but not spectacular. I have taken some pictures during the process. When I took the Macbook out, I got excited and was mad at myself putting my own fingerprints on it…LOL

Turned it on, saw the Apple logo, arrived at the Select Language screen. That’s it. I was not going to take anymore pictures to ruin my experience.

During the initial setup process, I heard the fan came on very loud several times and I was like: Shit, is my Macbook going to be this loud when I do anything. Fortunately, that goes away once the setup process is over with.

The display is beautiful and I had no problems with the glossy screen. When the display is turned off, it is glossy that you can see a reflection of yourself, but once you turn it on, it feels just like a regular LCD display, only brighter and sharper.

I am learning a lot of keyboard shortcuts and installed some applications, but there’s just a lot more stuff to explore with. So far so good.

I had a chance to play with the iPhone at an Apple store yesterday. I found that if you go to Google Map or any Google Map mashup in Safari, you can’t drag the map! This is because the iPhone interprets your finger dragging as dragging the web page, not the Google Map on the web page.

The Google Map integrated into the iPhone itself works great though. Is this a bug or am I just missing something? Hopefully Apple fixes this soon because this means all websites that have drag and drop like Ta-da list are not usable (though I have not tried Ta-da list on the iPhone).

Update: Just headed over to the iPhone Developer Site. According to Apple’s Web Development Guidelines:

• There are no gestures to perform cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop, and text selection operations.
• The width of a finger limits the density of links on a page. If the links are too close, your users won’t be able to choose a single one.”

So the answer is no, at least for now.