Helicopter Autopilot for Extreme Joy Riding?
It’s been a while since I posted, but this is pretty interesting: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/september10/videos/367_flash.html
Ruby on Rails Development Setup on an OS X 10.5 MacBook Pro
I was surprised to find that while there are a lot of good sites detailing steps for configuring a MacBook Pro to use MacPorts for installing apps for web development, that none of them worked for me. It turned out that MacPorts had an OS X 10.5, Leopard, problem that lead to the MacPorts Apache2 install failing. This prompted me to start documenting the steps that I’ve taken to build up my environment.
The basis for my steps started out with this great post from Garrick Van Buren. I basically followed his steps exactly, but encountered a problem when I tried to run “sudo port install” in step 6. When compiling, the output was this:
Undefined symbols:
"_ap_ugly_hack", referenced from:
_ap_ugly_hack$non_lazy_ptr in libmain.a(main.o)
"_ap_prelinked_module_symbols", referenced from:
_ap_prelinked_module_symbols$non_lazy_ptr in libmain.a(core.o)
"_ap_prelinked_modules", referenced from:
_ap_prelinked_modules$non_lazy_ptr in libmain.a(main.o)
_ap_prelinked_modules$non_lazy_ptr in libmain.a(config.o)
"_ap_http_input_filter_handle", referenced from:
_ap_http_input_filter_handle$non_lazy_ptr in libmain.a(protocol.o)
"_ap_preloaded_modules", referenced from:
_ap_preloaded_modules$non_lazy_ptr in libmain.a(config.o)
After a bit of searching, I found an unexpected solution in the MacPorts trac system. The solution was to run the following commands “sudo port install gawk“, then “sudo port clean apache2“, and then “port install apache2“. On to the next steps…
Migrating to a MacBook Pro
As part of my commitment to Ruby on Rails development, I’ve made the leap to a MBP. I feel like I’m pretty far behind the leading edge on this move, but at least I’m playing catchup now.
Even though I’m moving to the world of OS X Leopard, I have too much software and customization on my windows box to start over, so I’m extremely pleased at the performance of VMware Fusion. The virtualization technologies keep getting better and better, but Fusion is truly amazing for the simple reason that it works. Even more spectacular was my experience when I ran the VMware converter. This awesome utility made a VMware virtual disk based on the live instance of my windows laptop which I copied to an external hard drive. I then plugged the drive into my MBP, and voila, I could load my old PC in VMware Fusion and everything worked right away. I did encounter some networking trouble, but removing and readding the network virtual adapters solved those issues. Now I have two laptops in one. Very exciting stuff!
Portable Apps Keeps Growing
I’ve been a fan of Portable Apps for quite a while and they keep adding new applications.
This site has a great list of utilities that you can run off a USB (or other portable) drive without any installation requirements on the host system. This is especially useful for traveling when you’re going to be using other computers (such as at an Internet Cafe) and want to make sure that your browser data is kept private. You can even use ClamWin Portable to do a quick system scan for viruses and spyware to lower your exposure. You still have to worry key loggers, but it’s a step in the right direction.
You’ve heard about Photosynth, how about “Photo Tourism?”
Here’s a quick write-up about a conceptually similar process that was developed at the University of Washington. If these efforts are fully independent, it’s another fun example of great minds thinking alike.
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