RemVee.blog

Here’s my recipe to get CLSQL to work on my OS X development environment. I already had SBCL and MySQL 5 installed using MacPorts.

First you need to get the code:

git clone git://git.b9.com/clsql.git

MacPorts hides the MySQL libraries and headers somewhere in /opt so you need to make some tweaks. Change db-mysql/Makefile, by adding:

-I/opt/local/include/mysql5/mysql

to CFLAGS (first appearance) and:

-L/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/

to LDFLAGS (also first appearance). You’re now ready to build the interface. Run make from the clsql directory:

make

This should finish without errors. Now you can install CLSQL with the rest of you ASDF systems (I prefer to keep them in my home location):

cp -rp clsql ~/.sbcl/site
(cd ~/.sbcl/system; ln -s ../site/clsql/*.asd .)

To allow CLSQL to find the mysqlclient library you need to create /etc/clsql-init.lisp:

echo '(clsql:push-library-path #p"/opt/local/lib/mysql5/mysql/")' > /etc/clsql-init.lisp

Finally you can run the included test suite to see if it all works fine. Run the tests (my mysql root user doesn’t have a password on my development machine) as follows:

mysqladmin5 create clsql-test
echo '((:mysql ("localhost" "clsql-test" "root" "")))' > ~/.clsql-test.config
sbcl << EOF
(require 'asdf)
(asdf:oos 'asdf:test-op :clsql)
EOF

Not as easy as installing it on a Debian system (apt-get install cl-sql) but not very hard either.

Happy MySQL hacking with Common Lisp on OS X!

A specially crafted JPEG or TIFF image could force EXIFR in an endless loop. The problem is solved in release 0.10.6. If you are using EXIF Reader without having control over the images fed to it, upgrade as soon as possible.

The recent Ruby 1.9 release adds a lot of new stuff but unfortunately some of the changes prevented EXIF Reader from working. A slight case-syntax change (colon being deprecated), String no longer being Enumerable and IO becoming more character aware, broke my code.

The new 0.10.5 release runs on both 1.8 and 1.9.

EXIF Reader includes the ability to read thumbnails from JPEG again. This feature disappeared from EXIFR when in rewrote most of it to support TIFF reading.

I’ve released a new version of EXIF Reader. Just one small change; JPEG and TIFF objects can now be safely loaded and dumped from and to YAML. To get this to work I made a change to the orientation property; it returns an instance of Orientation now instead of a module. The returned object responds to the same methods as the module did so the upgrade should be painless.

Last week at RailsConf Europe I met some people who are using my ActiveForm code to make forms in their Rails sites. It’s about time to wrap it up as a plugin, so here it is.

From the README:

This plugin provides a base class for making forms with ActiveRecord validations without having a corresponding database table. You can use ActiveForm for:

• making forms which don’t needed storage, like simple email forms
• provide extra validations on existing ActiveRecord models
• make forms for composite objects

Installation:

script/plugin install http://svn.remvee.net/plugins/active_form

I know, there already is a plugin called active_form but I don’t like it. It doesn’t provide a “real” AR object causing all kinds of things to not work (like ActiveRecordHelper#form and DateHelper#datetime_select for instance), it doesn’t include any tests and my version is a lot simpler (flog score 20 versus 74).

Why not change the name? I like it! If you can come up with something better, please leave a comment.

Both JRuby super hero’s, Charles and Thomas, will be talking about JRuby tomorrow at Stroom Hotel in Rotterdam. Come and find out why having a Ruby interpreter on the Java platform is a “good thing”.

Registration seminar@finalist.com.

• bug fix; #4876 Unable to extract gpsinfo
• one-off bug in TiffHeader found and fixed
• access to InteroperabilityIndex

I’ve released a new version of EXIF Reader between changing diapers;

• bug fix; #4595 EXIFR::JPEG doesn’t support multiple comments, the
  comment property of a JPEG object now contains an array instead of a string
  when multiple COM frames are found
• EXIF orientation modules including RMagick code to rotate to viewable state
• access to thumbnail included in EXIF
• simple commandline utility, “exifr”, to view image properties
• overall code improvements including documentation and tests

Check it out:

gem install exifr

Fueled by a post by Danny. My take on the Java versus Ruby hype.

I am growing more and more tired of the comparison between Java and Ruby. They just don’t match.