"You have to install development tools first." - OSX Mavericks, ruby, chef, and nokogiri

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:57:06 +0000

I was trying to get knife ec2 working on my Mac, but even though my system Ruby was at 2.0.0, the embedded Ruby that chef/knife use (in /opt/chef/embedded/bin) was 1.9.1. Installing knife-ec2 should just be a matter of typing “gem install knife-ec2” but due to some weird issues with nokogiri, I burned about 4 hours trying to make it work. I tried everything I could find - installing iconv, libxml2, and libxslt via brew and telling “gem install” to use the custom libs in /usr/local/Cellar was the most common suggestion on StackOverflow - but nothing worked. What ended up fixing it for me was reinstalling chef. :|

Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:48:42 +0000

In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440x900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

Xcode on Evan Hoffman

"You have to install development tools first." - OSX Mavericks, ruby, chef, and nokogiri

Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar