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

Update: The method mentioned below no longer works because the website hosting it is offline.

If you’ve 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 its release was 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

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

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.

• Disable the static analyzer: -Xanalyzer -analyzer-disable-checker
• Disable Auto Retain Counting (ARC): -fno-objc-arc
• Disable all warnings: -w

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, you’re probably wondering to where some of your old developer applications ran off. I’ve listed the locations below so that you can easily add them back to the list of included directories.

# Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/
  * Application Loader.app
  * FileMerge.app
  * Icon Composer.app
  * Instruments.app
  * OpenGL ES Performance Detective.app

# Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/
  * iPhone Simulator.app

# Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Applications/
  * Printer Simulator.app