ImageMagick OS X Installer

Installing ImageMagick / RMagick on OS X does not have to be a hastle. There is a very handy install script on RubyForge that does all of the work for you.



http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/



Just be sure you have the following prereqs already installed on your Mac:

• XCode Tools
  
• X11 SDK
  
• X11.app
  
  
  
  Also, even though the script is supposed to include RMagick Ruby library, that piece did not work for me. Luckily, a simple “sudo gem install rmagick” worked like a champ for me.

Migrating From Subversion to Git

Simplistic Complexity has a very good overview about how to migrate from Subversion to Git.

Cleanly Migrate Your Subversion Repository To A Git Repository



For those of your that are using GitHub or any other centralized Git hosting service, the one step that is missing from this how-to is updating your .git/config file to point to your Git host. To do that:

• Create a new online Git repo via an online Git hosting site (such as GitHub)
• On your local machine, edit the file “{ROOT_DIR}/.git/config” from the directory that your are tracking with Git
• In the [remote “origin”] section, update the “url” field to be the url of your Git host
• Run the command “git push origin master”
  
  
  
  This should push all of your old Subversion files to your new Git Host.

Startup Hubs

I admit it, I’m an avid Paul Graham fanboy. But on the topic of startup hubs, I have to side with Carsonified.

However, I’m not sure Ryan did a good job of refuting Paul’s points, so I’ll give it a shot here. (Who am I to disagree with Paul, you ask? Good question…but that’s an ad hominem argument)

Paul’s Test

The gist of Paul’s claim is that, on a city by city comparison, SV would be better for any startup. He proves this by a simple test: suppose location didn’t matter. Then we could claim starting a startup in a small agriculture town is the same as starting one in SV. Since this is simply untrue, it must be that location matters. And since whatever argument you would use to determine a city is better than a small farming town, that argument can be applied to determining SV is the most preferable location, sitting at the top of the comparison chain.

Problems

There are two major problems with this test:

1. The criteria I choose to judge a city will not necessarily yield SV as the most preferable location. For example, if my startup was related to energy, Houston or Austin would probably be better than SV.


2. Similar to the first point, the criteria curve for judging the best city may not be linear. For example, suppose one of my criteria was number of startups nearby (because I want to be in a city with a vibrant startup community). But if that community reaches a saturation point, competition for labor, capital, and other resources will actually hurt my startup. So, up to a point, the number of startups begins to yield negative value. This was exemplified perfectly during the bubble years when no one in SV could hire decent employees and all the activity actually caused the entire region to tunnel-vision.

Conclusion

Later in the essay, Paul did leave open the door for “special” circumstances. But since every startup is a “special” circumstance, his test lacked the usual bullet proof logic he employs in his other essays. I think location certainly does matter, but up to a certain point. After the threshold, other factors begin to weigh a whole lot more, rapidly diminishing the location’s importance.

Visualize Redmine Models

I’ve been playing around with Redmine and was yearning for a way to quickly visualize the model relationships. Luckily, I came across Railroad, which makes it drop dead easy to do exactly that for your Rails apps.

This blog post does a great job of explaining the steps. I’ve summarized it here to get you going in literally a few minutes (OSX):

Install GraphViz

• get your version from here and install


• it installs to your /usr/local/, so just make sure you set it to your path so you can call “dot” and “neato”
  
  

  
  $ export PATH=/usr/local/graphviz-2.12/bin:$PATH
  

Install Railroad

• 
  $ sudo gem install railroad
  

Visualize!

• from your app root, for models:
  
  

  
  $ railroad -Mal | dot -Tpdf > models.pdf
  

• for controllers:
  
  

  
  $ railroad -Cl | neato -Tpng > controllers.png
  

If you want an explanation on the syntax, visit the original post or the Railroad site.

If you’re just looking for the Redmine models and don’t want to go through the steps, I’ve attached the output running the railroad command:
redmine_models.pdf