It's 2am and like the cat in the picture, I'm a little disgruntled. The one thing I've always disliked about Rails on a Mac is the fact that RMagick is so darn hard to get working properly. You can do it from source, but then you have to update it manually. You can try to use MacPorts, but that's a very fragile process. I had it working in Tiger, but to be quite frank, I'm not sure how that happened and it must have been more of an accident than anything else.

In this installment of a blog, I'm going to be covering how I managed to get RMagick up and running using a combination of RubyGems and MacPorts. I'll start by saying, it was a very clumsy process. After having everything installed manually using a great tutorial on Rails Envy, I decided to scrap that in belief there had to be an easier way. When I tried to use  MacPorts and then install the RMagick gem, I kept running into an error about it not being able to find the freetype library. It was indeed on the system (/opt/local/lib/...), but it wasn't where the gem installer was expecting it (/usr/loca/lib/...). Give me a break.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but Leopard has finally hit the streets, or at least made it's way via FedEx priority overnight to my apartment. Of course I tracked it the whole way from Illinois to Pittsburgh, but that's just part of the job when it comes to new products from Apple. I'm in the process now of getting things up and running again, but I plan to update this blog as tinker with Leopard. I'll try to primarily focus on things I like, things I dislike, some of those surprises that I didn't expect.

For those Ubuntu users out there, you are likely aware of the latest release, Gutsy Gibbon.Some of my buddies at work were wondering if I had upgraded the cluster o' servers in my office yet. The answer, at least until about 10pm tonight was no. In fact, after the last upgrade to Feisty Fawn, I was somewhat hesitant to ever upgrade again.

For those familiar with the Rails community, it's likely at some point you've bumped into a Ruby gem called ZenTest. Zentest aims to make the process of ensuring test code coverage and automating testing a whole lot easier. One of the components of ZenTest is called 'autotest'. Autotest is a continuous testing facility that automatically runs tests based on changes in your code. In other words, when you make changes to your code, autotest detects it and runs the corresponding tests. Take autotest, stir in some of Pat Eyler’s RedGreen gem, add a touch of growlnotify, and now you have a setup that automatically runs tests when you make source code changes to your Rails project and then notifies you of the results via Growl.