I saw something about an application named “Marked”. Is it a markdown editor? Would it help me stop forgetting to convert angle brackets into html entities? Like <this>?

First answer: No. Second answer: Maybe.

Marked is a markdown previewer. Instead of being the editor, it watches the file you are working on, and updates whenever it changes. Presumably this is quite nice if you are using an editor which auto-saves. It claims that the easiest way to get your document into Marked is to drag the icon from the toolbar. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with Emacs, as there is nothing to drag.

It turns out that if you migrate your blog to octopress, but then fail to do anything with it for two years, it is a bit of a pain to get it working again. In the interim:

• Xcode on your mac has probably updated 4 times and wiped out the command line tools (e.g., the command line compiler and build environment). Making this a bit harder is that installing the command line tools changed to something entirely non-obvious in Xcode 5. (Hint: from the command line, run ‘xcode-select –install’). So we spent a bit of time wondering why /usr/include is no longer present.
• Ruby has utterly changed on your mac (what? ruby-1.9.2 isn’t current anymore?) , and you have to struggle to get anything to work as now all of your previously installed gems are gone.
• You don’t work with ruby projects enough, so you struggle to get bundler to install an ancient version of some ruby gem which doesn’t realize that Mac OS X 10.9 is a perfectly valid OS release. Deleting the Gemfile.lock file and trying again is much more successful.
• Octopress itself has changed a lot. After pulling the changes from upstream, dealing with the merge conflicts, and running ‘rake preview’, you are greeting with a now totally broken blog with now zero posts. This is because you have to actually upgrade the source and style.

Now that I’ve beaten my blog software back into shape, I’ll have to actually thing of something to write about…

I’ll admit it. I’ve been ignoring this blog for a while. Recently, over lunch, my friends started talked about their moribund blogs and the basic security threat they implied. My friend Sean said that he’d migrated to octopress based on a blog post. Given that we had all been running various versions of wordpress, it seemed like a good idea to investigate some other, less risky solution. I had sort of kept up with wordpress upgrades, but didn’t make the leap to the 3.x series. I actually tried it recently, and discovered that my PHP version on the host wasn’t up to snuff.

Github is all the rage, but what if you don’t want to store your code up in the sky? No, you want to host it yourself. Or, more likely, you have to host it yourself, because you work for some giant corporation who doesn’t believe in letting their coders store their stuff in the unclean world.

So. What are your options?

Let’s back up a little. Why do you need to host git repositories at all? What sorts of things should a hosting solution give you? First of all, if you want to actually work with other people, and those other people use, um, different computers, it is quite convenient to have a central repository around to use as a conduit. Also, if you want to be able to push changes anywhere, a central hosted git repository is a not-very-confusing place to do so.

… from Carbon Emacs, That is. I pretty much assume that if you aren’t already a dedicated Emacs user you will just stick with TextMate Or TextWrangler, or whatever.

Anyway, did you even know that Cocoa Emacs existed? You may have heard Of Carbon Emacs or Aquamacs, but WTH is Cocoa Emacs? It turns out that with the final stable release of Emacs 23.1, it came with a Cocoa native build option. Thus, Cocoa Emacs is Now the standard, no-nonsense build of Emacs for OS X. So, how does Cocoa Emacs compare to Carbon Emacs? It acts and feels mostly the Same, although I think it looks a bit crisper and feels a bit faster (which is probably an illusion). It is smaller on disk (95 MB vs 157 MB), and, of course, it is based on a newer version of Emacs Itself. It is The Future!

After upgrading to Snow Leopard, I had to redo the installation of DBD::Oracle. This time I used DBD::Oracle 1.23. The good news is that the majority of my previous instructions no longer appear to be necessary: a normal build of DBD::Oracle looks ugly, but completes.

However, I did discover that if you are running a 64-bit perl, which you probably are, you need to get the 64-bit Oracle instantclient release. If you build DBD::Oracle and then cannot load the module because of missing symbols (e.g., _OCIAttrGet), then what is happening is that you linked against 32-bit libraries which cannot load from the 64-bit perl instance.