Jared McFarland

Keeping track of tickets in Git

Here at Bookmans, our development flow works in stages.  We code locally, push to a staging server, and move from the staging server to the live server.  To manage issues we have a ticket management system setup in ActiveCollab, where tickets are assigned a number by project.  A few days ago I pushed about five tickets to the staging server for review.  @tilopa checked 'em out, and told me that three of them were good to go live, but the last two had a few more quirks to work out.  This actually turned into an issue for me, I had been working in a Git branch called "jared", and merging into "master" to push to staging, then merging master with a branch called "stable" to go live.  But I didn't have a way to just push three tickets like, they were all jumbled into "master" together.

Now, when working on a new ticket, I branch out a ticket with the project name and the ticket number in it, for example "classifieds_8".  Then, when I want to push to staging, I merge that branch into "master".  When that piece of code is ready to go live, I don't merge "master" and "stable", I actually merge the branch containing the fix (ie, "classifieds_8") with "stable".  This way I can push one ticket at a time to the production server.

Installing ImageMagick on SnowLeopard 10.6

Update: You can install it a lot easier by following these instructions: http://github.com/masterkain/ImageMagick-sl

When I installed Snow Leopard on my laptop I did a clean install, so my working environment on my laptop was totally wiped out.  I had to reinstall ImageMagick the other day ( you can imagine my frustration when I was getting ImageMagick related errors thinking it was already installed properly).  The installation was a bit tricky, so I figured I'd share it with ya'll.

Here's how I did it.

1. First, go to the MacPorts site and follow their download/install instructions for OS 10.5 Leopard.  This install went smoothly for me.
2. Next, open up Terminal.app and type 
3. "sudo port install ImageMagick".  This will take quite awhile, as MacPorts will download and install all of the ImageMagick dependencies.  However, when I ran the install, it didn't actually download and install ImageMagick.  
4. To get ImageMagick installed and running, go to the ImageMagick download page and grab the Mac OS X Universal Binary.  Unzip it and you'll have a working copy of ImageMagick inside that folder (the folder will be called something like ImageMagick-6.5.3).  
5. Now, go back to the Terminal, and move the ImageMagick folder to a permanent home (probably not good for it to sit in your Downloads folder or on your Desktop).  I moved my copy to "/usr/bin/" and renamed the folder from "ImageMagick-6.5.3" to "imagemagick" so my full path is "/usr/bin/imagemagick".
6. Lastly, still in Terminal open up your .bash_profile or .profile file (found in your home directory; mine is "~/.bash_profile"), and add the following lines to it:

export MAGICK_HOME="/usr/bin/imagemagick"

export PATH=$MAGICK_HOME/bin:$PATH

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/lib"

Got MySQL to work with Rails in Mac OS 10.6: Snow Leopard

After a huge headache, I found this post:

http://cho.hapgoods.com/wordpress/?p=158

And while the post didn't offer the solution I wanted, a comment by "synth" in that post did.  It boiled down to running: 

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-Os -arch x86_64 -fno-common" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

The issue was in my choice of MySQL packages.  Snow Leopard has an entire 64-bit kernel, and so naturally, I chose the 64-bit MySQL package.  Mac OS X ships with a version of Ruby that is only 32-bit, and tries to compile with a 32-bit package.  You can force it to compile with the proper package by passing the above arguments to the installer.

Hope this helps someone!

Capitalizing on the Tucson Tech Community

I was in Austin for South by Southwest (SxSW) this year. It was a mind-blowing experience, and one of the most inspirational of my life. Austin is an amazing town, full of personality and great experiences. But I was surprised when I realized how much I wanted to come home to Tucson. I’ve started to notice, that no matter how engaging a spot I’m in, I always want to get back to Tucson. I love Tucson, and want it to be my home for the foreseeable future. I want to take advantage of Tucson’s spirit and community.

I propose, with some hard work and dedication, we can make Tucson a great tech center.  We have some great resources and incredibly smart people.  

We, as a community, can work together to educate and inspire one another.  We can enjoy the same benefits as the people in major tech centers simply by knowing each other and inventing ways to work together.  It isn't about vast numbers of people, but small passionate groups.  The web brings like minds together globally, but we can now use the web to find each other and act locally.  We can turn Tucson into something intentional, and beautiful, for ourselves and the city.

We’ve all made a decision to live here because we love this town.  Let’s capitalize on that!  Let’s take that love and turn it into bigger ideas.  Maybe a Bachelor’s in Web Development, renewable energies, public spaces, local tech education; we can continue to grow Tucson into the tech community we want.

There are a lot of smart developers in Tucson.  Let’s meet!  Let’s inform one another.  We could take a lesson from the Tucson Digital Arts Community (TDAC) and meet regularly to exchange ideas and promote ourselves.  

I think Tucson can be a major tech center in the world.  We have the resources, the people, and the culture.  All we have to do is bring them together.