bright pebbles dot org
alternative OS experience (all but windows)
If you chanced upon this message running gem command while trying to upgrade rubygems, you can get around it by typing:
$ RUBYLIB="/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/" ruby /usr/bin/gem
From here, you can upgrade rubygems:
$ RUBYLIB="/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/" ruby /usr/bin/gem install rubygems-update
$ RUBYLIB="/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/" ruby /usr/bin/gem update --system
Sogudi is an add-on for Safari that allows you to use the quicksearch Firefox feature in Safari.
Several years ago, when I first powered my compaq notebook with openSUSE linux, I wrote a script to convert all my sogudi shortcuts to firefox searchqueries.
It’s written in python. The python interpreter is shipped with Mac OS X by default.
To use this script, download it and type in the Terminal:
$ python sogudy2qs.py >quicksearches.html
sogudi2qs will convert every shortcuts in a single file that you can import in Firefox Bookmarks.
I've released a minor update to FontParade. I've simply fixed a bug, thanks to error reporting from Bruce.
Several users contacted me about some errors they got, but only few of them could tell me when or how the error occurred and could send me the console logs. I know that, for general users, it can be difficult, but they should know that it's impossible to debug an error when the only thing they say is: Hi, I get an error every time I try to print the list of my fonts. What could be?
If you are among them, please try this new version and if you get any error, feel free to contact me and try to send a detailed report.
After upgrading SuSE from 9.3 to 10.0, if you cannot view pdfs in Firefox, you have to relaunch the plugin installer script:
/usr/X11R6/lib/Acrobat7/Browser/install_browser_plugin
select the first option (global) and input the following path:
/opt/MozillaFirefox/lib
Reference: LinuxQuestions
A new FontParade’s release is online. New features are:
Now it should also work on Mac OS X 10.2, but I haven’t tested.
Download from here.
Yesterday, while I was looking for some answers in the mamasam archive, submitting a lot of queries, the page server was likely thinking nothing was enough relevant to me, because I eventually got these results (the gray dots are stars)!

I’ve posted my first article about development in Mac OS X.
In this article, I suggest how to avoid the annoying task of manually create a disk image after building an application with Xcode.
Feel free to let me know your comments and suggestions about it.
In this first release of FontParade, a little mistake is in the sample text’s sentence (someone pointed out to me). I have written:
The quick brown fox jumped over a lazy dog.
The sentence looks right, and is actually grammatically correct. Nonetheless, for the program’s purpose, a better sentence would be:
The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.
Why the difference matters? Because the second sentence is a pangram, whereas the first one is not.
Pangrams are short coherent sentences which include all the letters of an alphabet. The above is only the most common. By writing the correct sentence, you can see samples for all the letters and no s is missing.
Just released a tiny Mac OS X application that prints a pretty font list of all fonts in the System.

Here is the project's page.
Although SlashDock has been my favorite newsfeed reader so far, I think it is not very usable with a large number of feeds.
Switching to a different reader, I realized that SlashDock doesn’t allow to export the feeds, so I wrote a script for doing the job. The result is here.