Cosmo 0.3 was quietly released last week while i was away on vacation (yay my brother got married!), and i just now got around to announcing it.

i'm working my tushie off to get 0.4 out the door before i head to Europe in June. we're gunning for more frequent releases now, and even though i'll be away for a bit , we've got an intern starting tomorrow and a Google Summer of Code project kicking off this week, so hopefully we'll see interesting things coming available throughout the summer.

now with moving visuals: 50 dkp minus

in case you need to use some of the wonderful clips, this site has already sliced and diced them for you.

just installed the latest version of Ruby and Rails on my Mac. it was mostly straightforward, thanks to a couple blogs, and i thought i'd record the process here for posterity's sake.

i didn't want to use the system-installed ruby because i like to have a compartmentalized development environment that won't break with every system update. i didn't want to use Fink or DarwinPorts because i don't like waiting for people to get around to packaging the things i need. if i have to build some of my toolset myself, i might as well build all of it.

i built Ruby, Rails, FastCGI and LightTPD from source and installed the MySQL 5.0.21 OS X package using this excellent guide. the only problem i encountered was building the native mysql bindings for ruby. when i tried to install the mysql gem, it offered me three different versions, and i got linking errors when building the most recent one (2.7). this article told me to build the bindings from scratch, and that worked just fine.

so now i'm ready to write some software. my job includes one day a week of working on a personal project. i'm going to build an app for scheduling our conference rooms. nobody uses our system. i'm sick of writing my name with a pencil in one of the appointment books at the front desk and then going downstairs to find some helmet calling his girlfriend in the room i just booked. my shit will be infinitely scalable and robust with high availability. Google, Yahoo, and Fox will be tearing each others' throats out to give me battleship money for it. just watch.

i have to admit to liking this look. a lot.