Matthew Price

A perpetual work-in-progress about programming and related technologies.

Discovery Mated To Shuttle Carrier Aircraft ➔

"Discovery Mated To Shuttle Carrier Aircraft"

More photos of Discovery's 747 flight can be found at the Washington Post.

Node.js for Fedora, CentOS, and Amazon EC2 ➔

If you've recently tried to compile Node.js on a server running CentOS then you probably ran into show-stopping syntax errors. Unfortunately CentOS still ships with Python 2.4 by default even though it was released almost 8 years ago. To compile Node.js from the source you need Python 2.6 or higher.

A repository-based solution is your best alternative to finding a safe, headache-free way of updating Python. The source link is amazingly easy to set up and you get the added benefit of updating Node.js in the same manner as all your other installed packages.

On CentOS:

wget http://nodejs.tchol.org/repocfg/el/nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm
yum localinstall --nogpgcheck nodejs-stable-release.noarch.rpm
yum install nodejs-compat-symlinks npm

OTX Crashing with NSInvalidArgumentException: 'launch path not accessible'

Over the weekend I ran into a nasty error that caused otx to crash with NSInvalidArgumentException: 'launch path not accessible' before each run. After quite a bit of searching I finally found a solution on Cocoa Builder.

It appears that otx calls xcode-select -print-path each time it runs in order to locate the Developer tools, specifically otool. Since Apple is now bundling some developer tools into one application I had deleted /Developer and installed the new version into the main Applications folder.1 Unfortunately xcode-select was still pointing to the old Developer folder.

To correct the location and stop the crashes all I had to run was xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer.

  1. The moral of this story is probably "If you don't know what it does then don't delete it" but that would require a lifestyle change I'm not ready to commit to yet. ↩

Helpful Per-File Compiler Flags for Xcode

If you've ever included third party classes in your Xcode project then you know just how distracting it can be to get warnings for code that you trust or that you aren't allowed to modify.

To help save your sanity—and bring focus to warnings for code you can change—here's a helpful listing of per-file compiler flags.1

  1. I cannot stress enough that you should never disable warnings for your own code. ↩

Location of Xcode Companion Apps

With the release of Xcode 4.3 Apple has started bundling most of its developer applications into one file (Xcode.app) instead of using the /Developer directory.

If you're like me and use a launcher such as Alfred then you're probably wondering where some of your old developer applications ran off to. I've listed the locations below so that you can easily add them back to the list of included directories.

Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/:

Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/:

Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Applications/: