Sam Soffes

How to Install Ruby 1.9.3

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I'm a fan of living on the edge. Ruby 1.9.3 just came out today. It's apparently really stable as well!

We've been running it in all our 1.9 deployments for GC tuning + require speed fix.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Installing Ruby 1.9.3 is easy. My preferred approach is using rbenv and ruby-build by Sam Stephenson (great name, I know). rbenv makes it easy to have multiple versions of Ruby on your system (and in a much cleaner way than rvm).

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Genius Launch

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Everlane is a new startup that started here in San Francisco. They've done some ridiculously smart things with their launch.

With Everlane we've set out to build a new kind of retail experience, one that exists 100% online and bypasses all the middlemen to create beautiful designer goods, always under $100.

It's basically super high quality designer goods (clothes, ties, bags, etc). I kinda want all of it.

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Make iChat Better

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I really love iChat. I think it's a billion times better than Adium in my opinion. Bonjour alone is really fantastic. Plus, iChat is super gorgeous and Adium is definitely not.

Anyway, there are a few preferences that I really recommend turning on to make iChat way better. To see your iChat preference, choose "iChat" from the menu bar, then "Preferences". Everything I'm going to cover is in the "Messages" tab, but there are definitely a lot of other fun things to tweak if that's your thing.

iChat Preferences

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Easy Syntax Highlighting

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Syntax highlight in Ruby is annoying. Pygments is the best way to do syntax highlighting, but it's a Python project. (Why no one has ported that to Ruby yet is beyond me. Granted there are a few, but they are all kinda annoying, slow, or don't work that well.)

Anyway, for awhile the best way was to hit a web service running on App Engine to use Pygments since that's actually running Python. This totally sucks because you have to rely on that service—it could be down, network latency, etc.

Damian Janowski put out a fantastic gem that solves this called Pygmentize. It's dead simple to use too.

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Removed Facebook Comments

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Sorry if you left some comments. I appreciate it, but it wasn't really a good solution. They weren't that pretty, loaded slow, and didn't notify me when people posted. I had no way to track comments on my posts.

I might build something, but now, I'll just go back to no comments. If you want to leave a comment or ask a question, I'm @soffes on Twitter. You can always email me too.

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