Solutions

To get emacs to syntax color clojurescript files (cljs) add this to your .emacs (or other emacs config file):

 (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("\.cljs" . clojure-mode) auto-mode-alist))

Autodoc is a great tool for automatic documentation generation for your clojure code (the clojure api itself uses it).

If you are using github-pages to publish the docs, here’s a simple little gendocs sh script to dump into your bin folder to do all the work in one go:

Well, I too have gone down the rabbit hole of having to upgrade compiled-from-source apps to 64bit architecture after moving to Snow Leopard.  The hardest by far was postgres.  The sad thing is that 32bit version works just fine, but the adapter gems for rails don’t, hence the need for the recompile.

So I’ve just spent a couple hours updating wordpress to 2.8.4 (it’s been a long time since I’ve done an upgrade) and I’m trying to pick from the myriad syntax coloring plugins.  I tried using SyntaxHighlighter Plus which has nicer configuration options. But it doesn’t look as good as wp-syntax

So when I got my new MacBook Pro (late 2008 edition) with the fancy new trackpad that is an integrated mouse button, it had an incredibly annoying problem:  every 4th or 5th click, didn’t click!  So I’d be clicking on a window behind the current one, or clicking on an icon in the dock, and it would sometimes take two or three clicks to switch to the window or app.  After checking in with Apple (and unfortunately 2 hours on the phone walking through all sorts of different options), they ended up sending me out a new MacBook Pro.  The new one arrived yesterday and after a fairly straightforward migration (only the printer driver for my Canon MX850 didn’t automatically migrate), I now have laptop with a properly clicking trackpad.So, if you have this problem, you at least have my experience telling that it’s a hardware not a software problem.

Well, git definitely takes some gitting used to.

My situation is using git with three team members and a private shared repository that we all pull from and push too.  Additionally our project has a submodule that lives on a public git-hub repository (metaform).

Hey googlers looking for tech-support:

I was trying to install various packages (emacs, etc) from universe on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), and I kept getting weird segmentation faults (Setting up emacsen-common (1.4.17) Segmentation fault). Turns out that the problem was that my server was being hosted on a VPS running XEN for virtualization, and you have to first install libc6-xen: apt-get install libc6-xen

Ok, so in a previous post I described the rabit-hole which is switching to rails. Below’s my capistrano deploy script which solves a number of problems:

1. The production server needs a mongrel cluster configuration file added.
2. Deployment requires restarting the mongrel cluster.
3. On Ubuntu the database.yaml spec has to be modified to because you need to specify a mysql socket path differently from OS X.

So here’s what I added to make it work:

The last few days working on the openmoney.info website, I’ve had a major hassle dealing with what appears to be a bug in the html renderer in Firefox.

The issue is that in Firefox, text in a list item won’t wrap around a right floated image; like this:

The last month has been quite a trip down the rabbit hole into the new reality of ruby on rails! The promise of a powerful and well designed web application framework was just too much for me to resist, so I decided to leave my own yawaf framework behind (though it has certainly served me well).

Don’t you hate it in the computer field where something that was working fine for ages suddenly stops working? So this is what happened to me this time:

All of a sudden, when I plugged in my nice new Sennheiser USB headphones (PC165 USB) I couldn’t hear the sound. To get the sound to play, I’d have to go to the Audio MIDI Setup utility and toggle the mute button in the audio output settings. It had been working fine for a month, just plug it in and any audio output would just switch over from the speaker to th headphones. So I called AppleCare tech support who said this was a Sennheiser problem, and I sent e-mail to Sennheiser who of course pointed back at Apple.

Have you ever gotten the tcsh: Command not found. error after installing some code? Well it happened to me today, and I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I had already added the commands directory into my PATH, and set it to executable with chmod 755, but still the error kept coming up. The answer turned out to be that the command file (a shell script) that I had download had DOS line endings. Which, I quicly fixed using my trusty bbedit and bingo it worked fine.

Another installment in the collective tech-support arena: Gnucash wasn’t working under OS X Tiger (10.4.5); whenever I tried to run a report I kept getting the following cryptic error message in my terminal: dyld: Symbol not found: _program_invocation_short_name Referenced from: /sw/lib/libgnome.32.dylib Expected in: flat namespace A google search didn’t reveal anything with those error messages as keywords, so it was up to me to find the answer. Fourtunately my first stab in the dark worked! I did a fink selfupdate and then fink update-all (I’m using FinkCommander so I did those fink commands from the Source menu). I’m guessing that when I reinstalled gnucash after updating to Tiger, there were still some bugs in several of the libraries that were fixed by the fink update. Be forewarned that this take a loooong time to complete (overnight for me on my G4 powerbook). [tags]gnucash,fink,FinkCommander[/tags]

I’ve found that numerous times when I type into google a technical question, be it an error message that I’m seeing when installing some software package or some feature about a programming language, that where I often end up is in some person’s blog where they describe how they coped with exactly the same problem. This phenomenon seems to me a generalized solution to tech support, and also a wonderfully comunal and gift economy approach to problem solving. So I’ve decided to play the game too by creating a category for this blog called solutions, and, as often as I can, post my minor little breakthroughs in hopes that they will be helpful to someone else. And here’s my first: