Environment Variables in Mac OS X

I've been recently having trouble starting certain java applets on my MacBook. For some reason , once downloaded, the Jar file would not extract or run. After much tinkering I found that the applets would work if I started my browser from the command line rather than the dock.

Similarly I couldn't get certain scripts to work from textmate, but they would work if I started textmate from the command line.

The problem was that the $PATH variable I had set in my .bash_profile was not the same as that set in my ~/.MacOS/environment.plist file.

Certain applications depend on being able to read your PATH and other environment variables. However those set in .bash_profile have absolutely no effect on apps started from the Dock. Instead make sure that the PATH variable in your environment.plist file is in sync with that in your .bash_login by doing 'echo $PATH' in a terminal and copying the result into said file.

Syntax Highlighting in blogger

Eventually (in the far distint future) I want to set up my own server to host rails apps on and perhaps a blog driven by Mephisto - particularly cause you can get good syntax highlighting plugins for it.

In the meantime, I discovered that you can export your current highlighting theme from textmate as CSS, using the bundle command 'Create CSS From Current Theme' (vaguely enough ;) ). Then any time I want to post code snippets here, I use the similarly vague command 'Create HTML From Document'

All you need to do is copy and paste the CSS into your Blogger template.

Beautiful.

Hello and Welcome!

This humble blog serves mainly as an aide-memoire for the Ruby on Rails mistakes I've made, so that the head-against-brick-wall process is less painful next time. Who knows, perhaps as I get better, some of these posts will be useful to others too.