scott.hodson.blog

On OS X 10.4.11 (no leopard yet!) when I try to install the mysql gem I get an error, something about native bindings.

ScottBook:~ root# gem update mysql
Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Attempting remote update of mysql
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb update mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lm... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lz... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lsocket... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lnsl... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
--with-opt-dir
--without-opt-dir
--with-opt-include
--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
--with-opt-lib
--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
--with-make-prog
--without-make-prog
--srcdir=.
--curdir
--ruby=/usr/local/bin/ruby
--with-mysql-config
--without-mysql-config
--with-mysql-dir
--without-mysql-dir
--with-mysql-include
--without-mysql-include=${mysql-dir}/include
--with-mysql-lib
--without-mysql-lib=${mysql-dir}/lib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-mlib
--without-mlib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-zlib
--without-zlib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-socketlib
--without-socketlib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
--with-nsllib
--without-nsllib
--with-mysqlclientlib
--without-mysqlclientlib
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/gem_make.out

This should fix it (and yes after the first “–” there is another “–” preceeding the “/usr/local…” path).

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config


References:

• http://hivelogic.com/articles/ruby_rails_lighttpd_mysql_tiger/
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/133380

I stumbled across this series about old computers from the 1970s and I found the first 2 computers we had growing up in my house in San Jose, CA. Having an electrical engineer for a father made it more likely I’d have access to cool gear like this at such an early period in Silicon Valley’s early days.

My first computer was a variant of the IMSAI 8080. At the time my dad and his other hobbyist
friends assembled these computers together. The Altair was an earlier favorite and the IMSAI was an evolutionary follow-on. I think the one my dad had was a little better because it had the Zilog Z80 chip in it (oooh!). It had 64K 8″ floppy disks and ran CP/M. Before we had an OS on it I would have to enter in a 20 or so byte sequence on the front panel, setting each of the 16 bits of each byte, then pressing the Enter switch to enter the byte into memory. When I was ready to run the program I would push the Run switch and it would allow me to type on the keyboard and see what I was typing in the display. This was my first program! When we got CP/M I enjoyed playing some sort of ASCII Star Trek game and another adventure game where you would type commands like “open door” and it would respond with “The door is open but you can’t go in, a troll blocks its path”. You could call this an all-text precursor to Warcraft.

Then later on my dad got the Interact Model One, at that time sold by Micro Video in Ann Arbor,
MI. This was cool because it had some games and joysticks! All storage was on a standard tape deck. Eventually I got tired of the games and wanted to buy more but they were very expensive ($40!) so I picked up a book that taught how to program BASIC on it and I figured out how to write my own games. Those were the funnest games because they were made by me and I think I was about 10 or 11 years old while making my own games. I remember spending hours into the night trying to figure out how to make images move across the screen, how to react to joystick input and collision detection.

We’ve certainly come a long way since then, but I know my love for technology started at a very young age thanks to exposure from my dad, who gave me the tools to discover how much I enjoyed writing software that is useful and fun for me and others to use.

It turns out my side job playing baseball at Azusa Pacific University has panned out and I’m leaving my career in the technology industry to play baseball for the Oakland A’s. See ya in the dugout!

Story Here. You gotta love getting Google Alerts on your own name.

I’ve started a tumblog for fun. I’ll be posting any quirky, wierd, fun images or videos, etc instead of posting it to my blog here. Check it out here.

My Office 2003 spell checker didn’t recognize “blogosphere”, maybe they “fixed” it in Office 2007.

UPDATE 2/27/2007: I installed Office 2007 today, “blogosphere” passed the spell check. Looks like Microsoft listened

Check out these previously unmentioned features of the upcoming iPhone. I’m not sure how these features got leaked but it make the iPhone and even more compelling option.

By the way, did Steve Job mention anything about Macs at MacWorld? It just goes to show that event is really SteveJobsKeynoteWorld, not MacWorld. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had a press event at the end of January, about the same time Windows Vista is unleashed on the general public, just to steal some of Vista’s thunder.

After getting so much blog spam on my blog I virtually turned off commenting on my blog by forcing all comments to moderated and then just never actually moderating the comments! Then I read about the Akismet plugin for Wordpress. It’s working like a charm, catching all of my blog spam! This is a great plug-in if you don’t have it running already and you are a Wordpress user. Check it out. It requires an account at wordpress.com and an API key, even if you host Wordpress yourself.

I found this link that walked me through it. Make sure you accept the connection request on your phone when you try to connect, and make sure you pair your phone with you Mac first before trying to configure this. Good luck! I’m only getting 140kb down and 11kb out (ouch) but it’s good to have around when no WiFi is available.

When I startup my computer, and start Firefox 2, I often get this window pop-up window below

I never want to “Restore Session”, I just want to start with a clean slate, so I don’t want this window to even pop-up anymore. To turn this off you can change the browser.sessionstore.enabled setting in Firefox. To do that,

1. type about:config in your browser URL
2. go to the browser.sessionstore.enabled setting
3. change the setting to false

For more information about this config setting and other settings related to Firefox SessionStore features, check out http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.enabled

If you’re tired of waiting forever for Reader to load up your PDFs you should try Foxit Reader for Windows, a free PDF reader that loads up much faster and gets your PDFs open much quicker. It even works embedded in web browsers for when you click on a PDF on a website. Check it out!