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/.

Imagine you've got a blogging app and it's currently generating URL paths like posts/10 for individual posts. You decide the path should contain the post title (in some form) to make your URLs friendlier when someone reads them. I know I certainly prefer to read http://caiustheory.com/abusing-ruby-19-and-json-for-fun vs http://caiustheory.com/?id=70. (That's a fun blog post if you're into (ab)using ruby occasionally!)

This is a linked-in invitation I received from Rhys, and my reply.

Ever since I found out about the new hash syntax you can use in ruby 1.9, and how similar that syntax is to JSON, I've been waiting for someone to realise you can just abuse eval() for parsing (some) JSON now.

If you've not heard of it, MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks. Basically means you write in Ruby using Objective-C frameworks, and vice versa. It's pretty damn cool to be honest!