Gosh, I’ve been busy. Still, in between evenings out and work, I’ve been starting work on a fairly large personal project, which (unless I encounter a colossal brick wall) be written in Ruby, with the Rails framework playing a large part. So far, despite some hiccups, it’s been very pleasant; a fair amount of headscratching (in part down to my unfamiliarity with the langauge and its at-times-bonkers syntax, and in part down to working out just what I wanted to do), but every breakthrough has been delightful. A bit of trial-and-error, and then, suddenly, boom: I’ve got a whole new piece of functionality working with minimal code. I’m enjoying the langauge a lot – it’s reminding me of what I’d learned of Python a fair bit, but with some interesting twists. Particularly a fan of the idea that it’s a language that’s very understandable when spoken aloud, to the point of suggesting that methods with boolean outcomes should end in a questionmark, and that destructive methods should end with an exclamation mark. That’s fun.

More on this mystery project later, perhaps; I’m hoping it could be moderately big.

“The games press is often painted as corrupt, lazy and – as I mentioned – fundamentally stupid. This is because we tend to be corrupt, lazy and fundamentally stupid.

It’s not entirely our fault.”

Kieron Gillen has put up a full transcript of his talk from Free Play, a conference in Melbourne. In it, he explains to independent developers how to leverage the power of the gaming press – who, after all, really care about indepedent developers, whatever it may look like from the outside. It was probably a great talk. It’s certainly a great piece of writing, if only because it clearly explains the hectic, rushed, pressurized world that is magazine publishing to an audience who – whilst they might not understand publishing or journalism – certainly understand hectic, rushed, and under pressure. Well worth reading.

Haha! I solved the problem in the previous post with some cunning. And Google.

Basically, even though it looks like the mysql gem has installed correctly, it won’t have, because, once you’ve upgraded to Xcode 2.1, gcc is upgraded to 4.0. If you try and install the gem with gcc 4.0, it breaks. You need to install it with gcc 3.3 as your compiler. Doing this is as easy as typing

sudo gcc_select 3.3

in your terminal window before you run

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Once you’ve done all that, you can then type sudo gcc_select 4.o to return things to normal.

Phew. Scaffolds now work. That was an exciting little detour.