Thursday, April 28, 2011

Homebrew to the rescue--part two



Been having a terrible time lately with Text Wrangler in my Python class.  For some reason, Text Wrangler is causing a ton of problems handling whitespace correctly.  Of course we already Googled the heck out of the issue, set the expand tabs, etc....  The problem, however, is that TW is simply not that great if you've ever used Geany.

So now I at least have Geany on my MacBook.  Testing it for the lab.

Hard to blame students for being frustrated with a ton of "unexpected indent" errors.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Homebrew to the rescue!


I recently purchased a book on Lisp programming that looks quite good.  Getting CLISP installed on Mac OSX 10.6, however, was not easy--until I found Homebrew.

At first I had used MacPorts, but that was a bit painful.  After a few hours I finally gave up and figured I'd just limit my LISP programming to Ubuntu. 

Lately I have been writing a LOT of Python code.  Because of that, my "temporary" absence from using XCode and iOS dev has become ... well ... prolonged.  I simply can accomplish so much more in Python, and in one-tenth the time.

I dove in to Mac development with a positive attitude, despite using Ubuntu Linux for 99% of my computer work the last several years.  Sure, it's nice to have GarageBand and the hardware on a Mac that works so well with media projects.  But ... I miss Geany.  I miss the package manager in Ubuntu.  Most of all, though, I miss the feeling of using free and open-source software, and the fact that you are NEVER harassed by the software you use.

I left Windows long ago and have never looked back.  When I first came (back) to a Mac recently, I was happy to see how similar OSX was to Linux (or BSD).  Now, however, the differences are starting to accumulate. 


Anyway, at least Homebrew got me CLISP....

Monday, April 18, 2011

A Place for Our Stuff....

Remember George Carlin's great "a place for my stuff" act?  Well, I kind of feel that way now, as I consider letting my Dreamhost account (www.futureskyline.com) expire and take advantage of alternatives for posting my stuff. 

In particular, I'm looking into options for storing a bunch of Creative Commons stuff that my students and I would like to share with the world.  Things like incidental music for video games (both MIDI and audio files), images and sprites, and also a crapload of screencasts and instructional videos.