Semantic Dreamer

Writing Archive

Recipe: How-to install Pandoc on OS X 10.6.x (Snow Leopard)

Posted 08. Apr, 2010 in Apple und Mac OS X, Open Source, Open Web Standards, Software Engineering, Web Development

In case you wonder how-to install Pandoc, the “universal document converter” on OS X Snow Leopard…

… the secret sauce: go for Haskell Platform installer instead of following your standard (assumption!) installation approach using MacPorts.

The steps:

First install Haskell Platform.
cabal update
cabal install cabal-install
cabal install pandoc
Update your ~/.profile file with export PATH=/Users/[USERNAME]/.cabal/bin:$PATH and read in with source ~/.profile.

What is Pandoc? Great you asked! ;)

Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages, and S5 HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.
– Source and more details: johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc

Recipe: How-to install CouchDB 0.11.0 from source on OS X

Posted 28. Mar, 2010 in Apple und Mac OS X, Open Source, Software Engineering, Web Development, nosql

Prerequisite: MacPorts installed and SVN client at hand – I prefer a UI and therefore use Versions.

sudo port install autoconf automake libtool
sudo port install icu erlang spidermonkey curl
svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/couchdb/tags/0.11.0 couchdb-0.11.0-src
cd couchdb-0.11.0-src
./bootstrap
./configure
>> You have configured Apache CouchDB, time to relax.
make && sudo make install
>> You have installed Apache CouchDB, time to relax.
Start the CouchDB server by running: sudo -i couchdb -b
>> Apache CouchDB has started, time to relax.
To check that everything has worked, point your web browser to: http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils/index.html

Usefull resources:

How-to Install Rails 3.0 Beta on OS 10.5.8 Leopard

Posted 19. Feb, 2010 in Apple und Mac OS X, Open Source, Software Engineering, Web Development

While I did most of my recent web dev projects in PHP5 I still follow the development of Ruby on Rails …on it’s path to a stable version 3.0 release.

So no wonder that I had to get my hands dirty with the just recently released Rails 3.0 Beta.

While I still own a 12″ PowerBook with OS X 10.5.8 Leopard (latest OS X PPC release) I needed to get rails-3.0.0.beta running on this machine – of course ;-)

1. Upgrade to Ruby 1.8.7 with RubyGems

As at least Ruby 1.8.7 is required by Rails 3.0 I decided to use MacPorts (prerequisite!) to upgrade Ruby version 1.8.6 as shipped with OS X Leopard.

sudo port install ruby rb-rubygems

sudo gem update --system

source ~/.profile

Satellit:~ matthias$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2009-06-12 patchlevel 174) [powerpc-darwin9]

2. Install Rails 3.0 Beta (rails-3.0.0.beta) along with the required dependencies

sudo gem install i18n tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount erubis mail text-format thor bundler sqlite3-ruby

sudo gem install rails --pre

3. Create Rails app. and start the server

Satellit:~ matthias$ rails rails3beta-test

Satellit:~ matthias$ cd rails3beta-test

Satellit:~ matthias$ rails server

Inspired by Silumesii Maboshe.

Socialite – shrinking my Dock 1 for 3 apps

Posted 01. Dec, 2009 in Apple und Mac OS X, Digitaler Lifestyle

Socialite – by Realmac Software (the company that behind RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper) is a nicely shaped little mac software that eases up our life to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to us – or not ;-).

“From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.” (Source: Realmac Software)

iPhone OS 3.0 Software-Update available – but not for immediate activation, grrrrr!

Posted 17. Jun, 2009 in Apple und Mac OS X, iphone

Download succeeded, but activation failed due to activation server temporality not available. Most probably overloaded – or should I say overwhelmed?!

iPhone-OS3.0_Update-failed.png

… the downside of the iPhone being a huge success in a global community that is all about early adoption – even for software updates! ;-)

Update 18.06. I finally managed to install and activate the update early morning today – probably could have managed to do so late night yesterday as well, but after all didn’t feel it’s worth the price of feeling sleepy all day.

Mac: HTTP Client – your friend while (semantically) RESTing

Posted 08. Mar, 2009 in Apple und Mac OS X, Linked Data, Open Source, Semantic Web

Speaking about nice little GUI helpers on the Mac: in case you’re – again like me – a fan of REST for your (semantic) web application’s software architecture you might enjoy working with Todd Ditchendorf’s HTTP Client.

A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages.
(Source: ditchnet.org)

The app. comes in particularly handy while exploring the semantic web’s linked data spaces. E.g. in case you want to test with different Accept headers (JSON vs. XML/RDF) against your linked data space, e.g. my URI matthiasgeisler.net/id/me, built with Paget.

Mac: XML Nanny and XMLPalette – handy little helpers

Posted 08. Mar, 2009 in Apple und Mac OS X, Open Source

In case you’re – like me – at least every once in a while in favour of an application with GUI over the dominant shell/ terminal, you might find these two nice little Cocoa apps. come in handy while working with XML, DTD, XSD and XSL(T) on the Mac:

XML Nanny

XML Nanny is a free (as in beer) Cocoa application for Mac OS X Tiger that allows you to parse and validate local or remote XML documents against DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, and Schematron schemas.
(Source: xmlnanny.com)

XSLPalette

The free, native, XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 debugging palette your favorite Mac OS X text editor has been missing.
(Source: ditchnet.org)

Safari Microformats plugin

Posted 17. Feb, 2009 in Apple und Mac OS X, Microformats, Open Web Standards, Semantic Web, Web 2.0

The Safari Microformats plugin (Mac OS X Leopard 10.5+ only) notifies you when the author of the website has published Microformats and allows you to easily import hCards and hCalendars in Address Book and iCal.

How it works

When a hCard or hCalendar is present in the website you visit, the Microformats logo will be shown in the address bar.

screenshot_safarimicroformatsplugin_semanticdreamer_com.png

Click on the logo, and a sheet opens, showing you all the Microformats. You can add them individually, or all at once.

screenshot_safarimicroformatsplugin_semanticdreamer_com-add.png

At the bottom of the sheet, you can choose in which iCal calendar and Address Book group you wish to import the Microformats data. If you have installed Growl , a notification will be shown when you import data. Click the notification and iCal or Address Book will launch.

(Via Safari Microformats plugin.)