But sometimes it lies in your favor. On casual glance, the box looked like it contained round, small cookies; not so.

Now it’s very easy to get a full compiler environment, including pure gcc (rather than clang’s emulation of it), that can build all variants of ruby and gems without an issue. The trivial process goes like this:

First, download and install the Command Line Tools for Xcode. These can be installed either through Preferences > Downloads > Components in the full Xcode 4.3 install, or by downloading and installing the standalone package.

Next, install homebrew, a fantastic package manager for OS X. Run brew update to make sure it’s fully up to date.

Next, add the homebrew “dupes” repository (or “keg”), some necessary recipes for installation, and the real gcc 4.2:

brew tap homebrew/homebrew-dupes
brew install autoconf automake
brew install apple-gcc42

Now you can safely build and install various rubies. rvm is a great way to do this without stepping on the system-installed ruby:

bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm get head
rvm install 1.8.7
rvm install 1.9.3-head

Now you can install compass and use scss in style.

#

On the minus side: Apple has made, and will continue to make, an intentionally crippled and limited device in the name of a better overall user experience.

I believe I was and still am entirely accurate; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course. The recent concerns about address book privacy illustrate the concern perfectly; unrestricted access can easily lead to a very poor user experience.

Furthermore, when I said:

[The iPad will be] an unbelievable platform, and one which the vast majority of people will find satisfies their needs and exceeds all their expectations.

it turns out that I was more right than I expected to be – people are using iPads as their primary (!) machines, without so much as an external keyboard, for serious writing and content creation. It doesn’t satisfy all my needs, but it sure satisfies most of them, and exceeded most of my expectations.

What’s next? Well, iCloud and various other things have demonstrated that Apple’s goals point squarely at closer integration of all platforms, less reliance on the continual presence of a particular device itself, and a simpler user experience. Some of these things are fantastic – Photo Stream saves me a huge amount of time – and some of them not so much – Launchpad on the desktop is a sad joke. The App Store sandboxing and signing restrictions are very much a reasonable tradeoff (especially with non-App Store developer signatures in the offering for Mountain Lion), but splitting the APIs up so some of them are only available to App Store apps and some of them are only available (or at least useful) to non-App Store apps seems like a nightmare if it continues.

So: the iPad will continue to be a rampaging success. Apple TV will end up being less about a media box per se and more about a central hub for your devices to cross-connect (or maybe the Apple TV box will be /just/ a media interface, and the next generation of Airport devices will provide the smart hub). They’ll (maybe) figure out how to make iCloud not suck so much if you have a bunch of machines connected to the same account all on a local network. Xcode will continue to be an amazingly headachy IDE wrapped around a progressively more impressive compiler. Other businesses will continue to violently misunderstand what Apple is doing. They’ll continue to do unpleasant, walled-garden things in the name of a delightful-but-controlled user experience. I’ll keep using Apple products, and a Linux box, and a Windows box (but I’m probably not going to upgrade to W8 any time soon).

And I’ll hope that legislation doesn’t cause the internet to crumble out from under me in the meantime.

#

One might suspect him of being slightly jealous of my new godson.

(Side note: my spell check, until moments ago, thought that Frodo was misspelled and perhaps I meant Rodolfo. Of course! I’ll quit calling him Frodo immediately. How could I be so silly?)

I knew it was going to be a big investment in time and energy; obviously the schedule of my day, weekend, life was going to be tied to caring for and spending time with the dog in a way that it simply isn’t for cats. You can leave a cat alone for a day and it hardly notices; a dog will go neurotic if it’s treated like that (even leaving aside the food and elimination questions).

I’ve lived with a dog before, though not as the primary caretaker, so I knew roughly what I could expect to get in return for care and feeding: a happy and devoted companion with simple needs and an endlessly big heart. In so many words, though – it had been a long time, and I didn’t really have any internal feeling for how that was going to go; only that I had enjoyed it then and it would be worth the effort now.

Enter Frodo.

Frodo is a Papillon, a breed noted for intelligence, agility, luxurious silky fur, and big ears. He is small, but not tiny – he’s a bit over eight pounds right now, and he might get to ten or even eleven pounds. He has a protective streak and doesn’t like to hear anyone yelling at anyone else, but he’ll make friends with anyone or anything (including those squirrels, if he ever manages to catch one). He’s clever and observant, a bit needy, and tries very hard to be a good boy when he remembers to.

Nothing I knew about living with a dog prepared me for how profoundly it affected me to own one. Sure, the responsibility for an animal; I’m used to that, having owned taken care of cats for many years now. I had forgotten the pleasure and joy in coming home to a wagging tail and excited paws, no matter how tired the puppy is. However, I had not even thought about how taking him on walks every morning would affect me.

I enjoy getting up in the morning now.

It’s not that I hated it before. I wasn’t a morning person for most of my life, and getting up was a struggle, but I was always too groggy to care much. When that changed abruptly a few years ago and I started getting up at 6:30 every day, it was just a fact; I had a few extra hours in the morning, shifted over from the evening. I didn’t enjoy it, but I didn’t enjoy putting on my shoes, either; it’s just part of the day. Now, though, I feel like something is missing if I don’t get up and walk the dog.

It’s not precisely a meditation thing. The solitude is arbitrary, subject to interruption, and quite limited, and there isn’t much silence unless there was a heavy snowfall. It’s probably not about exercise; adding a thirty minute walk to my morning is nice, but not a huge plateau. It isn’t even the consistency of the ritual, really; I’ve had many morning rituals that I’ve enjoyed for years on end, and none of them have made me feel as good about getting up in the morning as this. It’s not even because he’s such a joy to walk; often he is, but just as often he’s alternating dragging his heels with charging off into the sunset.

I think it’s more likely that it’s reminding me to look at things with simple wonder now and then. Frodo isn’t complicated (he’s picky! but not complicated); he loves to go outside and smell things and look at things and walk around, and it doesn’t matter much where we go or what we do. He adores meeting people on his walks, and he loves to get to play with other dogs, but he’s just as happy to take a solitary turn around the block and go home to his comfy bed.

Being out there with him every morning helps me remember to see things the same way – enjoy the world for what it is and where I am. Look for opportunities, but don’t miss what I have for what I might have. Take every chance to spend time with friends, and make new ones when I can.

I’ll leave the whole “licking myself in the middle of the park” thing to Frodo, though.

It’s sometimes hard to visualize what’s going on with Git when you’re unfamiliar with it, and not everybody is familiar with the concept of a Directed Acyclic Graph, so to help get everyone up to speed, we ordered a Tinkertoy set.

There are probably better ways to spend Monday morning at work than putting together a Tinkertoy model of a Git repository, but I can’t think what they might be.

Start with:

• 2lb. duck legs, still frozen

Roast in tinfoil at 400° for about 45 minutes.
Pick off meat and chop coarsely.

Break long bones in half. Place bones in stock pot along with:

• 2 gal. water
• 2 cups chicken broth or stock (optional)
• Several stalks of celery, with tops if available, whole
• Several carrots, with tops if available, whole
• Several large sprigs of rosemary (6″-8″)

Bring to a boil, and maintain a high simmer or low boil for a couple of hours.
Strain and discard solids. Replace liquid in pot, along with:

• Chopped duck meat
• Lentils (to taste – 3 cups-ish)
• 1 large onion, chopped
• Several stalks of celery, chopped
• 2 medium cans of crushed tomatoes
• Lots of salt

Return to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and simmer until lentils are done, about 18 minutes.

1. That I can write using one consistent set of tools, and not have to keep three or four or more targets in mind when I’m writing;
2. That all of my writing (and any images and so forth I might publish) is in one convenient central location for backups and storage;
3. That I can publish things publicly, note things privately, or write to a group of friends and acquaintances without difficulty;
4. and that I can fiddle endlessly with the fine details of implementation but that the general functionality just works and does what I want.

It’s also convenient that I can also use the publishing platform I get paid to work on, since it means that such fiddling around with fine details of implementation is, as I like it to be, both my hobby and my profession.