OS X Lion comes with ruby 1.8.7-p249 installed, although it's compiled against libedit rather than libreadline. Whilst libedit is a mostly-compatible replacement for libreadline, I find there's a couple of settings I'm used to that don't work in libedit. (Like history-beginning-search-backward.)

As of Xcode 4.2 Apple have stopped bundling GCC with it, shipping only the (mostly) compatible llvm-gcc binary instead. The suggested fix is to install GCC using the osx-gcc-installer project. However, I wanted to build and install it from source, which apple provides at http://opensource.apple.com/.

I recently came across the at(1) command, and wondered why it wasn't executing jobs I gave it on my machine. Had a poke around the man pages, and discovered in atrun(8) that by default launchd(8) has the atrun entry disabled.

On a couple of occasions now I've wanted to read from STDIN into an Objective-C command line tool, and both times I've had to hunt quite a bit to find the answer because nothing shows up in google for the search terms I used. "Objective-c read from stdin" and "objc read stdin" both turn up results ranging from using NSInputStream ...

Recently I ran into an issue where I was working on a project which had files I wanted git to ignore, but I didn't want to commit a .gitignore file into the project. In case you don't know, any files matching a pattern in .gitignore in a git repository are ignored by git. (Unless the file(s) have already been committed, ...