The installation went easily for both ruby gems and ruby, but I decided to take a ’short cut’ and copy all my gems from /Library/Ruby/Gems into my /usr/local/lib directory which started raising all kinds of errors — this one, in particular was obnoxious.

[BUG] cross-thread violation on rb_gc()

Luckily, all that means is that I copied over gems which were compiled against the standard OSX ruby version and not the new one. This was a little script I wrote which will show you which gems need to be re-compiled. Just cd over to your /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems directory and run:

gems $>ls -1 **/**/*.bundle|ruby -pe '$_.gsub! /\-.*/, ""'|uniq

to get a list, or pipe that into $> sudo gem install and that should clear up those gc issues.

If you think you’re interested — this post is about the following:

1. How to get your current user/directory in the title of terminal (iTerm.app for this post — same applies for Terminal.app though)
2. How to make the backspace/delete keys work properly in nano/pico on local and remote servers
3. Update your current user/path in the title when you SSH into a remote machine
4. And how to setup password-less SSH, just because its on topic

.bashrc modifications

Making Terminal.app’s title update to the current user & path for both local and remote servers while letting the backspace and delete key work properly — all in one solution!

Add the following lines to both your local & remote .bashrc

# this is what updates your Terminal's title -- you can of course modify this
# but im not explaining how -- google it
export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\\033]0;${USER}:${PWD}\\007"'

# this will make OSXs backspace & delete keys work properly
# in nano & pico
export TERM=xterm
stty erase ^H

# fancy prompt you say?
# again -- google for more info on this
export PS1="\\[\\033[0;34m\\][\\!]\[\\033[0;32m\\][\\u.\\h: \\w]\[\\033[0;32m\\]\\$\\[\\033[0m\\] "

#gives you something like:
# [0][rob.hades: ~]$ echo 'hello world!'

Now lets bind our servers for SSH so we don’t need passwords

Passwords are annoying — especially when you are using scp and rsync a lot.

Here is a very simple way to drop those passwords and have SSH do all the work.

In your terminal app (Locally)

Make your .ssh directory
$>mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cd ~/.ssh

Generate yourself some keys
~/.ssh $>ssh-keygen -t dsa -f ~/.ssh/id_dsa

Copy your public key to your remote server (Make sure the remote server has a ~/.ssh directory as well!)
~/.ssh $>scp id_dsa.pub {user}@{remoteserver}:.ssh

In the remote computer

Add that public key to your authorized_keys file for SSH
$>cd .ssh && cat id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys2

Cleanup those files and make sure the authorized_keys file is set to the right perms.
~/.ssh $>chmod 640 authorized_keys2 && rm id_dsa.pub

That should make your life a bit more convenient

Using pbcopy and pbpaste can save your life sometimes and are probably one programs I miss the most when using Linux. Anyway, heres just a simple “1 liner” for prepending.

cat FILE | pbcopy && echo "Prepend Text" > FILE && pbpaste >> FILE

Pretty simple, but it can be useful at times — like when you have a script that would be better off with a shebang line than being run by hand and you’re too lazy to open an editor.

Firstly, let me just say that compiling PHP has never been this difficult before. It shouldn’t be difficult at all actually. So heres the basic run down: I need SOAP, GD, SimpleXML and a few other miscellaneous extensions to make all my dev apps work properly — this went smoothly on the ppc laptop, and I (stupidly) assumed that the Intel would be even easier. My first couple attempts were splattered with GD errors driving me to the brink of insanity as I scrambled up all the pre-requisites. Finally, I had all dependencies met and the configure script STILL would not quit barfing on me. I gave up and finally just installed PHP without GD support (naturally ruining the one project I’m working on currently). I gave up, until I felt feisty enough to give it another shot.

The configure script was choking on a linking error (GD build test failed. Please check the config.log for details.) and kept telling me to hunt config.log for some answers. It turns out that ./configure was attempting to link with shell variables that were empty.

Looks something like “-L: directory name missing“.

The solution

Hacking my way through the configure file you get to the culprit.

LIBS=" -L$GD_LIB $GD_SHARED_LIBADD $LIBS"

Turns out that echo $GD_LIB is blank and being a major pain in the ass. To fix this, just edit the line to look more like: LIBS=" $GD_SHARED_LIBADD $LIBS". After that, try a make clean, rm config.cache and try to compile again. Hopefully this will save you a couple hours of hating life.

Resources:

• http://www.phpmac.com/articles.php?view=3 — good instructions for getting those GD dependencies.
• http://www.phpmac.com/articles.php?view=159 — more insight from the same site
• http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20041104230209410 — more about GD dependencies, and a little more insight into problems
• http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread670263.html — explains the final solution in more depth

My Configure Script
It might be beefed up in the future, but I’m just relieved to have it compiled & working right now — I’m exhausted

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/php5 \
 --mandir=/usr/share/man \
 --infodir=/usr/share/info \
 --sysconfdir=/etc \
 --enable-cli \
 --enable-soap \
 --with-ldap=/usr \
 --with-xml \
 --with-libxml-dir=/usr/local \
 --with-zlib \
 --with-zlib-dir=/usr \
 --with-openssl \
 --enable-exif \
 --enable-ftp \
 --enable-mbstring \
 --enable-mbregex \
 --enable-dbx \
 --enable-sockets \
 --with-curl=/usr \
 --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
 --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config \
 --with-apxs \
 --with-gd \
 --with-jpeg-dir=/usr \
 --with-png-dir=/usr \
 --with-freetype-dir=/usr \
 --with-xpm-dir=/usr

Problem
I know how to _USE_ icon sets and set my icons*. My issue is that I want to take a folder of, say, *.PNG files and make the icon reflect the contents. I did some digging, and the solution is pretty simple — AND elegant.

Solution
There is a relatively unknown program, at least it was to me, called “sips.” To take the generic PNG icon and replace it with a small thumbnail of the actual image you simply run sips -i {image.ext} from the command line. Beautiful!

Example

1. Open a shell
2. cd {folder full of icons here}
3. find . -name "*.{ext}" -exec sips -i '{}' \;
4. Wait…
5. Start at the top of this page with how to change icons

Resources

• http://forums.macosxhints.com/

Solution
After some digging around, I found a nice article from John’s Blog on using automator for this task. Surprisingly, it is easy to do – just a few steps to save you countless seconds of Photoshop splash-screen torture.

How-To

• Fire up Automator
• Under the Applications list, choose Finder
• Under the Finder actions list, choose Get Selected Finder Items
• Under the Applications list, choose Preview
• Under the Preview actions list, choose Scale Images
• Select ‘Show Actions When Run’ under the Options drop-down
• Save as a Plug-In

(Click for larger size)

Usage
Take a quick screenshot (cmd-shift-3). Now, currently it is setup so that it will resize the original file. I like this since it gives me control of how I want to manipulate the image — for example, if I need a thumbnail I can simply option-drag to copy, and resize.

Right-click the ‘Picture X’ and under the Automator menu you should see your Automator plug-in. Click that, and viola! Done.

(Dialog that pops up)

Hopefully this saves someone the trouble of opening Photoshop for something as simple as scaling an image.