TeX woes

After a recent macports update I had issues getting TeX to recognize the local files installed in

~/Library/texmf

. I re-ran texhash, but to no avail. Long story short, it turned out that the issue was not with texhash, but with the search path for kpathsea in

/opt/local/share/texmf/web2c

. Changing the 'TEXMFHOME' variable to the default setting did the trick. In addition, to prevent further updates from overwriting the change, edit the first line and alter the word 'original' (to, for example, 'custom').

The sorry state of cross-platform GUI development in Ruby

Let's take a look at the contenders:

* fxRuby. Yeah, this one's a dinosaur. Pass.
* ruby-tk. Won't play nice with system libraries on Snow Leopard.
* wxRuby. Ditto.
* Shoes. Works, but does not play nice with already-installed gems, since it uses a separate system. It's own system will install but not run with Nokogiri.
* hotcocoa (via Macruby). Won't install Nokogiri because it references the C library libxml2, and Macruby does not like that yet.

So, what is one to do? Well, you could either give up on Nokogiri (fat chance), or say to hell with developing a GUI in Ruby and just go implement it either natively, or in Java if you need it to be portable. Then you can either re-parse the files, or use IPC to connect to a ruby daemon script.

Tomcat on OSX

Forget about using macports. It wants to get xercesj 2.9.1, but apache only serves up to 2.9.0. Instead, I followed the instructions listed here.