Hear the Tiger RoR

07 August 2005

Well, there’s a thing. I managed (with relatively no hassle) to get a local install of Ruby on Rails up and running on my 10.4.0 Powerbook. Quite surprised – given the scattered documentation – that it went so well. For reference, I used these instructions, which worked exactly as specified. I did already have an install of MySQL, but that was dead easy when I did it a few months ago, too.

Update: of course, then I ran into problems. What I discovered is that those instructions are for an install of Tiger with XCode 2.0, which still only has gcc 3.3. I upgraded to XCode 2.1, and gcc upgraded to 4.0 – and there my troubles began. Of course, then I solved them.

Now to get to work in it. I have an application in mind that it would be ideally suitable for; whether or not I can get my head around the language (especially without making my forget the other ones I know) is another matter. If I was a real programmer, I’m sure this wouldn’t be a problem, but alas, I’m not. Ah well.

Costikyan at Free Play

02 August 2005

God, I’d forgotten just how well Greg Costikyan writes some times. In particular, his presentation to Free Play in Melbourne, downloadable from this post, makes its (very worthwhile) points well. If the games industry doesn’t collectively wake the hell up, and snap out of being marketing-and-publisher-driven, it could find itself in deep trouble. Greg explains this point in his slides in, well, a little more detail than me.