UPDATE, 1.11.2006 I updated the script to build neon (and thus subversion) with SSL support.

I just got my MacBook Pro back from a repair where its faulty hard drive was replaced. All the data was migrated but the system folder was for some reason rebuilt so I lost the installed Developer Tools, and along with that, subversion.

I installed the latest Developer Tools from developer.apple.com, but for some reason they don’t include subversion anymore. My next attempt was to install subversion from darwinports, but that didn’t succeed either. It seems that the ports version of subversion depends on apr-1.2.2, but all the mirror sites only have apr versions 1.2.6 and 1.2.7. I probably could’ve hacked it to use one of them, but then I figured the ports version would be kind of old anyway, since subversion was just updated to version 1.4. Thus, I decided to build it from scratch.

The problem with installing subversion from scratch is that it depends on a few other packages (included in the subversion-deps package) that need to be built as well, separately. So I hacked together a shell script that downloads the current subversion and subversion-deps packages and compiles and installs them:

subversion-1.4-install-all.sh
Usage:

<filter:code>{=html}
sudo sh subversion-1.4-install-all.sh
</filter:code>{=html}

(use sudo here to avoid writing your password multiple times during the course of the script)

Disclaimer The script worked fine on both my MBP and a G4 PowerBook. It should probably work fine on any *nix, but use at your own risk. If it doesn’t work, I will only return the price of the script.

When I was young (really young), my aunt told me we shouldn’t buy Nestlé products. The company was distributing free baby milk formula samples in third world countries, causing the mothers’ own breast milk supply to dry up. The mothers would end up not being able to breast-feed their own children and thus spending all their money (if they had any) on the artificial formula. This wasn’t the only reason for the boycott but that was what I was told back then. So I started to boycott Nestlé. Since I had no money to spend elsewhere, I convinced my family to be the executioners in my boycott.

A few years later I was working on a website project for Greenpeace when I stumbled upon the StopEsso project.

The greenhouse effect and its connection to global warming were by then a known and proven phenomenon. Almost everyone agreed, including some of the most vocal former opponents. Well, except one company and - coincidentally - one president¹.
The message of the StopEsso project was sad:

Exxon [ExxonMobil, whose brands include Esso and Mobil] is doing more than any oil company to block international action on global warming. While the rest of the world tries to stop global warming, Exxon spends millions of dollars sabotaging US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to reduce climate-changing gases. We need to stop Exxon to stop global warming.

I had never been a green fundamentalist, nor even an activist. I support green values but don’t like people throwing stones at each other or burning fox cages no matter what the cause. But reading that text really hit the nerve. Our Esso credit card never got renewed. I’ve never voluntarily filled up at Esso stations ever since. I wanted to make an impact, even if a small one. Dammit, I wanted to do the right thing.

At the same time it seemed that Nestlé hadn’t really changed their habits. Shipping millions of liters of still water thousands of kilometers to a country with endless ground water supplies clearly indicates they just don’t care. In 2004, the largest ice cream manufacturer in Finland was bought by Nestlé. It has made the boycott really hard (I’m an ice cream connoisseur) but I’m trying to stay true to my heart.

Even though I feel these incidents have made me do the right thing, my hands still feel tied. The power of word-of-mouth is strong, but still local. Internet has helped to get to the information, but the information is still fragmented and doesn’t necessarily have the impact it would deserve on a company. If there are more companies as unethical (and I would be kidding myself believing there aren’t), where would I find that information?

It should thus come as no surprise that I was fertile ground when two crazy guys from southern California, Ryan and Rod, wanted me to build world’s first social responsibility exchange with them — a site that would bring the power back to the people, for good. I knew right away this was what I wanted to do.

Meet dotherightthing.com

The site will be open for public in a few months. In the meantime, sign up at dotherightthing.com to get the most recent news about the project. You might even end up as a member of a private beta… and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Finally, rubyonrails.fi has seen the light of day. It’s still pretty rudimentary, sporting the default Mephisto theme, but already has its first articles published. We also set up a Finnish Rails wiki, which will hopefully be accessible through wiki.rubyonrails.fi in the near future. So if you speak Finnish and are interested in Rails, head on over and fill the blog and wiki with questions.

Warning! Only for geeks/ruby heads.

If you’ve been sick like me or somehow else missed the rise and fall of Rails Blob (R.I.P.), you’d better check it out. It’s pretty weird how hysterically funny pieces people can write with the help of typos and (a lot of) inside wisdom.

Since people seem to be so concerned about the lack of buzz around RailsConf Europe, I’ll officially start the buzz here. Ok, not officially, and not even start, since David already kicked it off a few weeks ago. But I’ll enumerate a few reasons that make the steep price worthwhile, for me at least.

Today’s reason: Kathy Sierra

If you haven’t heard about Kathy Sierra or her blog Creating Passionate Users, you must have been living the last year your head stuck in a dark place. Kathy is one of the very few writers that can write compelling, useful articles every. single. day. No wonder she’s been one of the blogging rookies of the past two years, rising from zero to Technorati Top 100 hero in no time at all.

If I would have to select a single blog I would be able to read on a desert island, that would probably be Creating Passionate Users. Sorry, all you great Rails, hacking, web standards/design and business blogs. But I just can’t think of a blog with as universal appeal to a hacker-designer-entrepreneur-geek as Kathy’s. Her writing just clicks. And if she’s even distantly as great a speaker as she is a writer, seeing her keynote live is probably alone worth the torture of hopping to Stansted in a cramped Ryanair seat.

Rails is all about programmer happiness, and there is no better way to celebrate that than the living embodiment of passion opening the conference.

If you’re doing any Ajax development on Rails and haven’t yet dug into RJS Templates, you’re missing out pretty badly. Unfortunately the documentation for them has been sparse at best. The first even fairly comprehensive material that I found about them was in Jens-Christian Fischer’s unofficial Rails Reference. Then came Cody Fauser’s O’Reilly ebook RJS Templates for Rails that brought a bit more meat around the bones. Now, for all you “show, don’t tell” people (to which I belong), my friend Geoff (of Nuby on Rails and Rails Podcast fame) has started a new service called PeepCode, which provides quality screencasts about Rails development. And, lo and behold, the first part of the series is RJS Templates:

This 50 minute Quicktime video tutorial shows you how to use the basic RJS methods from scratch. You\’ll be adding to your skills and using RJS to make more responsive and interactive applications.

Go try it out! There is a free 2-minute sample available.

With Rails, the split is that opinions go into core and
options go into plugins.
— David Heinemeier Hansson in Rails-Core

If you have ideas on how to best use the funds raised by the Caboose Documentation Project effort, please post them to the new Caboose Documentation Wiki page at Stikipad.

Late as always:

Congrats Rails and thank you, David, for having been able to share the two years of beauty and passion. There’s nothing better than a guilty pleasure. Here’s for many more years to come!

Now that Scoop started, I’m going to follow the pack:

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce is one of the reasons it’s been so quiet on this channel during the last months. We’re writing the last chapters now and the book will hopefully go to print in September, so there’s not a whole lot of waiting time left anymore.

Our goal was to make the book a bit different. It is a how-to book, going through building a complete E-Commerce site. So if you’re into learning by doing, you might enjoy it. We also wanted to promote the good Rails development practices. That’s why we use test-driven development always when it’s appropriate, teaching the different testing approaches in Rails on-the-fly. And since Apress is also the publisher of Joel, it would have been a pity if we couldn’t have sprinkled a bit of humor in the book.

If you want to be notified when the book is out, please do fill the following form and we’ll keep you up to date. We won’t share your email address with anyone and the mails sent to the list will be strictly related to this particular book.