“[...] Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

(Via swissmiss.)

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

The steps:

1. First install Haskell Platform.
2. cabal update
3. cabal install cabal-install
4. cabal install pandoc
5. 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

• 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:

• CouchDB: The Definitive Guide – Part VI. Appendix Installing from Source
• Apache Couch DB Source Code

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.

“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)

… 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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.)

Apple Store Boston, November 2008
Apple Retail Store – Boylston Street

… and there are some more: Apple Retail Store – Store List