Blag-o-matic

I ran into a minor issue today while trying to install Phusion Passenger on a web server I’m setting up; I don’t install development tools on my web servers. I have a whole mess of reasons for why I do this, the primary being that it makes keeping several different servers (ie, production and development) in sync a lot easier.

The problem with Passenger is that the gem assumes you have g++ installed so it can build the apache extension. Fortunately, for me, I keep a separate server that is identically configured, except it has build tools installed. My solution was to install passenger on that box, configure it, and then copy the directory over to my production box.

Short version:

gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module
cd /usr && tar -zvcf ~/passenger-2.0.2.tgz `find ./ -name “*passenger*” -print`

Now just copy ~/passenger-2.0.2.tgz over to the production box and untar it into /usr. Normal Passenger setup applies from this point forward.

The 10.5.3 update crashed on me this morning and left my Mac Pro in a funny bit of broken.  I got a grey screen on boot and then nothing.  No Apple logo, no spinning wheel, nothing.  After about 10 minutes I got the globe icon (I think this says it’s looking for netboot servers).  Anyway, I got it fixed.

First I booted into Target Disk Mode and installed the combo updater from another Mac, although I’m not sure this was necessary.  I think the real trick was to hold down Option during boot to get into the boot chooser screen, and then wait.  After about 5 minutes it finally saw my hard drive.  I selected it and was able to boot.

After booting I checked with bless and sure enough, my boot settings were completely broken.  Reselecting my system volume from Startup Disk in System Preferences fixed it.  The take away is that on Intel Macs it seems that even without a valid boot image, given enough time the EFI boot loader will find it.

So I have a few lingering questions from the big iPhone event yesterday. First, what about Apple’s server products?  Where is the support for iCal Server?  Also, along that, what about wireless sync for non-enterprise users?  I realize this wasn’t the focus of the event, I just hope they’re going to provide something.  What I’d like to see is a no cost sync only .Mac account for all iPhone owners.  I really should be able to add a calendar entry on my phone, and have it show up on my Mac Pro without having to connect it.Second,  what about iCal and Exchange integration?  If Apple can make Calendar on the iPhone work with Exchange, I really hope they make it work with iCal.  I could completely dump the POS that is Entourage if iCal could read my Exchange calendar.

http://www.pascal.com/diary/?p=183.  The idea basically is to provide an option for power users that would stop Spaces from ever switching your space for you.  If Safari is open in space 1 and you’re on space 3 and click on Safari in the Dock, it would open a new Safari window for you, rather than darting you over to space 1.(via daringfireball)

This is just too cool.

I’ve been saying this ever since Boot Camp came out. At work the first thing we do when we get any new computer in is to wipe the hard drive and put our Windows image on it. After that you tend to spend a couple hours re-installing all of the drivers and the few utilities that actually add value to the computer. I will admit that IBM Lenovo has a decent auto-installer, it’s slow, and it bugs you periodically to press a button just for kicks, but it sure beats downloading and installing everything by hand.It just amazes me how Apple is the only company that can give you a single CD image that installs all of the drivers and utilities you need for all of their computers. One disk will cover you if you have a MacBook, iMac, MacBook Pro, or Mac Pro, and when you’re done, everything works. There are no “unknown hardware” icons left in device manager, no mysterious keys on the keyboard that don’t work. Hell, the latest versions of Boot Camp even support two finger scrolling. Best of all, when you’re done, there’s no crap to uninstall.(via daringfireball)

Groupware Bad.  So who wants to build it on top of Leopard’s calendar server?

Via (Pharyngula)

Do you like stickers as much as this guy?

Ask Microsoft Word’s thesaurus for synonyms for information.(via I Am Joe’s Blog)