This has been driving me crazy all evening. It turns out when you use Homebrew, the installation directories for OpenSSL and Readline libraries are different. Fortunately, there’s a compilation override as mentioned on the ruby-build Issues page:
RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=”–with-openssl-dir=`brew –prefix openssl` –with-readline-dir=`brew –prefix readline`” rbenv install 2.0.0-p0
You can of course change which Ruby version to install, like 1.9.3-p392.
This post is mostly for me to remember how to do this. 
It turns out that getting Devise (or the built-in mailer for that matter) to send email through Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Email Service (SES) is stupid easy. Most of the work is just getting SES set up properly. After that:
1. Verify some email addresses
2. Generate your SES SMTP Credentials
3. Edit your ActionMailer settings in the production.rb file
That should do it! Send yourself a test message.
Remember: you can only send to verified email addresses while in Sandbox Mode. You must request Production Mode access to send to any unverified email address. Otherwise you will probably see the Rails log error: Net::SMTPFatalError (554 Message rejected: Email address is not verified.)
This is mostly a note to myself on how to do this.
Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES) seems pretty easy to use but working with the DreamHost DNS management proved slightly tricky because of the large amount of steps and the order of them. Getting the DNS values right was also not completely obvious. Here’s my recipe:
1. Register a Domain
2. Change the Domain to DNS-only
3. Turn on Amazon SES
4. Verify Your Email Address
5. Update DNS custom records on DreamHost
6. Wait…!
I have constantly been needing to filter the Font Awesome icons list for the icon I’m looking for, and I finally built a quick-n-dirty name searcher:
Oh, Mac OS X…
It is pretty. But it has so many quirks. I suppose if you’ve been a long-time Mac fan these things don’t feel that weird to you, but I have to say that I’ve just come across the most non-obvious way of changing an application’s settings.
A few months back I took the plunge and made Mac OS X Mail my primary mail app. I figured all I had to do was hook up the accounts like I did on my iPhone and iPad: pick an account type, enter some credentials, and that was it. Generally-speaking, that is true. But I started running into this problem: sent messages from OS X Mail weren’t showing up in my Sent mail folders on my iPhone and iPad.
I still have lots of IMAP mail accounts. When you add those IMAP accounts to an iPhone or iPad you can go to the advanced server settings and choose where you want the Sent messages to go: on the phone/tablet or to a folder on the server. And when you pick the folder on the server you normally would pick “Sent”. Not so for OS X Mail!
OS X Mail creates a folder called “Sent Messages” and there is no indication anywhere that’s the case. If you look at the Mailboxes bar there is a Sent category which expands to show you all the sent-mail folders for all accounts you’ve connected. And if you open up your IMAP account folders you might see a Sent folder but no Sent Messages folder. As you send messages out your Sent Messages folder gets all those new sent messages.
(And, no, there is no indication in the Preferences for Mail that Sent Messages is the destination sent mail folder.)
How do you fix this? A post back in 2004 has the answer:
If you look at your IMAP folders now you will see the Sent Messages folder listed.
How horrible.
Interesting interview with Ted Hamilton at YouTube by numberphile (Brady Haran):
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/oIkhgagvrjI” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
“The number 300 was chosen. … When the code was written … what was actually written was … less than or equal to 300.” (If view_count <= 300 then views += 1.)
TIL how to work with the CSS @font-face rule. The short of it is this syntax inside your CSS file:
@font-face {
font-family: <a-remote-font-name>;
font-weight: <weight>;
font-style: <style>;
src: <source 1> format("<format 1>");
src: <source 2> format("<format 2>");
...
}
For example, trying to get the Magallanes font to work on this site seemed easy at first because I just copied the CSS that MyFonts.com had given me. But the problem is that the font-family attribute was the only thing that was set. As a result by setting the main font to “Magallanes” it wasn’t understanding what to do with the bold and italicized fonts.
The solution was to set:
@font-face {
font-family: "Magallanes";
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
src: <source 1> format("<format 1>");
src: <source 2> format("<format 2>");
...
}
Then the italics one was:
@font-face {
font-family: "Magallanes";
font-weight: normal;
font-style: italic;
src: <source 1> format("<format 1>");
src: <source 2> format("<format 2>");
...
}
Then the bold-italic:
@font-face {
font-family: "Magallanes";
font-weight: bold;
font-style: italic;
src: <source 1> format("<format 1>");
src: <source 2> format("<format 2>");
...
}
And so on.
Another problem of not including the font-weight or font-style was Mobile Safari (iOS/iPhone/iPad) was not using the fonts at all.
I recently heard about ack, a command line tool that is grep-like but more über. It also has a cool ASCII art logo:
_ /| \'o.O' =(___)= U ack!
What? How did I miss this OS X Lion feature?!
If you hold down the Option key while resizing a window the opposing edge will mirror your resizing, or as one blog calls it “balanced resizing”. Or, if you hold down Shift the window will maintain its aspect ratio.
For real fun, try holding down Option+Shift. Wicked easy window resizing!!!