Coding

I decided to learn a lower level like like C, in part because I want to learn about memory management, leaks, etc. While following Zed Shaw’s tutorial I got stuck on installing Valgrind, which isn’t yet supported on Yosemite. To get up and running, I generally followed Taras Kalapun’s tutorial, which installs Valgrind from svn. However, initially I ran into issues because aclocal and autoconf weren’t installed. Then I ran into issues because XCode wasn’t installed. »

I decided to try my hand at Octave today, to see if it simplifies model prototyping. One issue was that Octave wasn’t connecting properly to its graphics library. Anytime I ran hist(), for example, I would get: dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib Referenced from: /usr/X11R6/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib Reason: Incompatible library version: libfontconfig.1.dylib requires version 13.0.0 or later, but libfreetype.6.dylib provides version 10.0.0 dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.6.dylib Referenced from: /usr/X11R6/lib/libfontconfig.1.dylib Reason: Incompatible library version: libfontconfig.1.dylib requires version 13.0.0 or later, but libfreetype.6.dylib provides version 10.0.0 /Applications/Gnuplot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot: line 71: 865 Trace/BPT trap GNUTERM="${GNUTERM}" GNUPLOT_HOME="${GNUPLOT_HOME}" PATH="${PATH}" DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="${DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH}" HOME="${HOME}" GNUHELP="${GNUHELP}" DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH="${DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH}" GNUPLOT_PS_DIR="${GNUPLOT_PS_DIR}" DISPLAY="${DISPLAY}" GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR="${GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR}" "${ROOT}/bin/gnuplot-4.2.6" "$@" /Applications/Gnuplot.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gnuplot: line 71: 871 Trace/BPT trap GNUTERM="${GNUTERM}" GNUPLOT_HOME="${GNUPLOT_HOME}" PATH="${PATH}" DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="${DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH}" HOME="${HOME}" GNUHELP="${GNUHELP}" DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH="${DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH}" GNUPLOT_PS_DIR="${GNUPLOT_PS_DIR}" DISPLAY="${DISPLAY}" GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR="${GNUPLOT_DRIVER_DIR}" "${ROOT}/bin/gnuplot-4.2.6" "$@" error: you must have gnuplot installed to display graphics; if you have gnuplot installed in a non-standard location, see the 'gnuplot_binary' function So, after stumbling across this SO question, here’s how I resolved the issue. »

For a project I’m working on, I needed to install the command line interface for AWS Elastic MapReduce. The catch is that the CLI requires using ruby 1.8.7, and is not compatible with later versions. Bummer, because when I ran ruby -v I learned I was using 1.9.3. However, I had a vague memory of upgrading to 1.9.3 when I was either playing with Rails or installing Jekyll a couple months back. »

I have two workstations. The first is a custom built desktop that runs Windows (more on this later, hopefully). The second is an Asus laptop that primarily runs Linux. I recently moved my sites over to Jekyll. I host them locally in a Dropbox directory, then push them to s3. On Windows, I use jekyll-s3 to do the push. It’s convenient and works well. Just run gem install jekyll-s3 and then to push you run jekyll-s3 (the first time you do this, it walks you through configuration). »

There are two ways to install jekyll: the easy way and the (relatively) hard way. ####THE EASY WAY The easy way is to download Railsinstaller. It sets up ruby, rails, bundler and other packages in C:\Railsinstaller. (Note: since I already have git installed elsewhere, I unchecked the install dialog box for git and ssh.) Once you’ve got Railsinstaller up and running, open powershell and run: cd C:/Railsinstaller gem install jekyll I tried to run gem install rdiscount as well, but couldn’t get it to work. »