Monthly archives for "May 2013"

Like a lot of other designers & developers, I run Mac OS X & Rails—with all the dependencies that implies. In the past, I’ve been burned by OS X upgrade incompatibilities (upgrading to 10.7 was particularly painful in fact), so now I’m not as keen to upgrade to the latest & greatest as soon as it comes out.

Which brings me to 10.8, or “Mountain Lion”. I installed this on my laptop & it throughly munged the system. What’s worse, with the move & redesign, I had little time to fix it: so it remained seriously broken until about a month or two ago. This article helped the situation greatly.

However, when I finally got around to installing Mountain Lion on the laptop, using the notes above, of course the damned thing failed, but in a new and interesting(?) way. I had upgraded the system, reinstalled XCode & its command-line tools, and went to install rvm:

rvm reinstall 1.8.7 --without-tcl --without-tk

But I received the error:

ERROR: The autodetected CC(/usr/bin/gcc-4.2) is LLVM based, it is not yet fully supported by ruby and gems, please read `rvm requirements`, and set CC=/path/to/gcc .

So I looked at “rvm requirements”. It suggested I run rvm install 1.8.7, but this caused the same error message. Rooting around, I saw mention of “rvm notes”, which suggested that I run rvm get head && rvm reinstall 1.8.7. That did it!

After that I went into every local copy of Rails apps to trigger acknowledgement of the new rvm setup, and to re-trigger bundling in order to sort out all local gems. All sorted!

I also deal with a few PHP apps. It turns out that the httpd.conf files no longer enable PHP, and that you need to do so. Find the httpd.conf file in /etc/apache2/ & uncomment LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so (line 116 in my version of the conf). In addition, scroll down to configure the features for /Library/WebServer/Documents & edit for the following (line 209):

  
  <Directory />
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride None
      Order deny,allow
      Deny from all
  </Directory>

Finally, under DirectoryIndex, ensure you add index.php (line 231), so that php files will be served. Restart Apache (sudo apachectl restart) Sorted! Many thanks to this article which helped with the PHP side of things.

As of today, we’re changing the name of our company from Argument from Design to Ardes.

Why are we doing this?

There are many reasons for the change. Let’s go through them:

• The URL for the company’s website has been ardes.com for virtually its entire history;
• Ardes has always been our shorthand name for the company;
• You’d be surprised how few people know how to spell “argument”;
• The connection between the philosophical concept of the “argument from design” & religious people has only grown stronger over the years, and I didn’t want to be associated with that.

That last point deserves a little more explanation. My rather wilful interpretation of the argument from design was that it needn’t be a religious argument, but rather merely evidence of a conscious decision process: that something clearly & beautifully presented was evidence of a conscious hand & not the product of chance. Many people use it in an attempt to prove the existence of god, and that’s become something of an issue for me, because I’m not religious.

Anyway, I’m getting over my head, and the point is that that isn’t what we’re about. We’re all about making beautiful & easily-usable things.

Soon the blog will reflect not only the Ardes.com redesign, but its name change as well.