doit, doit now!

If you’ve ever tried to install Ruby, Ruby On Rails, MySQL 5, and the Ruby C bindings via DarwinPorts on Mac OS X, you might find yourself running into a weird error. Or three. My particular problem was that the Ruby gem for the MySQL bindings couldn’t find the MySQL5 header files or libraries, and as such the gem would never compile. DarwinPorts uses its own weird little placement for the files, and as such it took me a few minutes to figure out how to get it to build. So, assuming you have a default install of DarwinPorts and have gone through the trouble of installing Ruby and Ruby gems, just do a

gem install mysql — –with-mysql-lib=/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/ –with-mysql-include=/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql/

and everything should work swimmingly.

Sometimes I read things on other people’s sites that I already had mentally composed, just never put down in any tangible form. I swear people steal them straight out of my head.

In any case, Peter Dubuque has written an amazingly succint, well-put letter to some Democratic congresspeople detailing the absurdity of the past few years, and how the Dems are just as responsible for the horrendous transformation of American life during the Bush Ascendancy as the Republicans are.

As Peter quoting Edmund Burke puts it: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Just an awesome read.

Cringely has written a fascinating article on Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and the history and future of Microsoft. I haven’t read anything like it in a long time. Cringely is usually on point, so it’ll be interesting to see if his history lesson plays out in the way he thinks it does.