Freeciv 2.2.2 + Snow Leopard = Half Joy

Got some feedback on the Freeciv forum regarding Freeciv 2.2.2 on Snow Leopard. While the SDL version works but without sound, the GTK (X11) version does not. I asked the kind poster for more info, let's see what comes of it.

There is a workaround to enable sounds in the SDL version. Read about it here.

Freeciv 2.2.2 Trifecta

Freeciv 2.2.2 came out not long ago. I put together the following Mac OS X packages for it:

• GTK version for Intel, 10.5.8+


• SDL version for Intel, 10.5.8+


• GTK version for PowerPC, 10.4.11

These also install into /opt/com.bitaxis instead of the canonical /opt/local directory used by MacPorts. Hence, they are now compatible with MacPorts.

You can check them out here.

Enjoy!

Freeciv 2.2.1 -- I am back!

I was looking through the MacPorts man pages, and noticed the pkg and mpkg directives. Which got me thinking...

So, I decided to take another crack at Freeciv packaging for Mac OS X. As I mentioned in another post, my old way of packaging Freeciv was untenable for me as someone with limited knowledge in GTK+ and X11.

After some experimentation, and with the help of MacPorts, I put together two brand new Freeciv packages that are much easier to put together, albeit with an ironic twist of the results being incompatible with MacPorts. Go figure!

Anyhow, you can read about them here as well as try them out for yourselves.

Enjoy!

Rails 3 Beta 4 -- Success!

After watching this series of Rails 3 screencasts, I decided to give Rails 3 a try.

Reading the beta release notes, I updated to the late rvm gem, then proceeded to install Ruby 1.8.7-p174. While the installation was successful, and I was able to create a Rails 3 app, I couldn't run rake. Any attempt to invoke it, even just to list rake tasks, gave me a cryptic error about Rail's delegate method.

Next, I tried to install REE's flavor of Ruby 1.8.7, and that failed to install.

So lastly, I tried 1.9.2-preview3, and that worked. Woohoo!

assert_false

Ruby has a pretty good unit-test framework. However, it is annoying that assert_false does not come built-in. So, here is my own that I use in my Rails applications' test code:

Enjoy!

Peaceful Co-Existence Between Subversion and Git

So I have been using Subversion as my source control tool for my Rails apps for a couple of years now, and I am very happy with it.

Recently, I have begun to use Git as my source control for plugin development, and using github.com as a means to share my work with the community.

So, the dual-tool strategy begs the questions:

• Do they play nice together?


• How does a developer make them play nicely with one another?

The short answers to these questions is Yes. If you want the details, read on.

Given the Tidy code I am versioning using Git is not a full-blown application, I need it to reside within the context of a Rails application to test it. So this is what I did:

1. Have my application, let's call it X, version controlled using Subversion


2. In application X's vendor/plugins directory, I create a Git repository called tidy; this is where I maintain and test Tidy's code


3. This Git repository is tied to github.com, so that I can push any changes out for the community to see


4. The tidy directory is also version controlled by Subversion, so that my application has a working copy of Tidy that I can deploy


5. However, Subversion complains about the tidy/.git directory, and Git in turn complains about the various tidy/*/.svn directories


6. To remedy this, I added a tidy/.gitignore file to ignore the various tidy/*/.svn directories, and I added set the svn:ignore property on tidy/ to ignore the tidy/.git directory

With this setup, I can now more easily maintain the code for both my Rails application and the Tidy plugin.

Github.com Has Uptime Issues?

Since I've started to use it frequently within the last month or so, I have noticed several times where github.com either responds very slowly or is outright unavailable. Even as I am typing this, my repeated attempts to load github.com in another Safari tab just failed with another server error.

Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me?

Update: Looks like they are having issues with their backend...