Next MacBook ordered, different experience alltogether. Just ordered a few minutes ago and got “Fast Ship (EMEA) / Schnellversand (EMEA)” as shipping method. It seems that by selecting a single BTO/CTO Mac it is possible to skip the centralized european logistics hub in Tilburg/NL and go directly with UPS from factory door to my desktop.

I am wondering if this shipment method is more trackable than “Merge In Tnst NL Til“; at least it is a lot faster, with comparable orders I used to wait 12 days just for delivery, not including manufacturing. This is down to seven days max with “Fast ship (EMEA)”.

It pays to order the machine without any other stuff that needs to be merged in transit. Get it at your local dealer. Order global, buy local ;-)

Check out Adrian Spender’s experiences on this as well.

Update 11/10: Future looks bright :-) Just minutes ago, my next laptop has been shipped, directly with UPS, tracking and everything. And you won’t believe it, it is supposed to arrive in two days! Nice.

Update 11/12: After just three days in production (Friday, Saturday and Sunday - Apple calls them ‘workdays’ - go figure) and measly three more days for transport - the MacBook is here! For your reference this is the full UPS schedule of the package. Take care, though, the data on UPS’s site is updated with a lot of delay, sometimes more than 10h!

Apple meant well when they pre-installed Ruby on Rails and a few gems. But since they didn’t keep up to-date with the fast pace of development at least Rails and a few gems are heavily outdated.

You basically have two options to proceed if you want to get a reasonable modern RoR installation on your Macintosh:

You go the long and hard way: Install XCode and all the developer tools Apple supplies (2+ GB), and follow this excellent tutorial in building everything from scratch and leaving the RoR installation Apple supplied in pristine state.

Take the ’small-footprint-approach’ and tackle possible problems later (IF Apple to decides to update the system as well and IF this causes trouble). This is the route I chose and here is how it goes without any problems or errors:

• sudo gem update –system
• sudo gem update rails –include-dependencies

Basically what happens is, the first command updates the Ruby gem system and gems; the second command updates the Rails installation to, currently, 2.1.2. Something you are not getting is an updated SQLITE gem, because the native extensions can’t be built. But if you are working with a remote MySQL server this is no problem.

Also check out these slightly outdated instructions from Apple on this topic: Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard.

GeoKit is a powerful geolocation framework for Ruby on Rails. It works nicely with Rails 2.1.2. Beware, SQLite doesn’t suffice, you need to switch to e.g. MySQL. The following commands in script/console helped quickly validate the install of the plugin:

include GeoKit::Geocoders

=> Object

start = MultiGeocoder.geocode(”Wippertstr. 2, Freiburg, Germany”)

=> #<GeoKit::GeoLoc:0×1fcfc64 @zip=”79115″, @state=”Baden-Württemberg”, @success=true, @provider=”google”, @lng=7.829245, @precision=”address”, @city=”Freiburg”, @country_code=”DE”, @lat=47.97692, @street_address=”Wippertstraße 2″, @full_address=”Wippertstraße 2, 79115 Freiburg, Germany”>

endpoint = MultiGeocoder.geocode(”Tokyo”)

=> #<GeoKit::GeoLoc:0×2049cf8 @zip=nil, @state=”Tokyo”, @success=true, @provider=”google”, @lng=139.682282, @precision=”state”, @city=nil, @country_code=”JP”, @lat=35.678451, @street_address=nil, @full_address=”Tokyo, Japan”>

home.distance_to(endpoint, :units => :miles)

=> 5945.92866816475

To while-away the days until the new unibody MacBook arrives: Take a look at these disassembly-pictures.

Just a short note: Today I migrated from me.com to regfish.de’s email-offering. It works like a charm, a lot faster and less latency at least from continental, ‘old’ europe. One caveat: Configuring the SMTP-server in Apple Mail required me to set the SSL port manually to 465 ‘Use custom port’, instead of the standard setting ‘Use default ports (25, 465, 587)’.

Their IMAP and SMTP servers work nicely with Apple Mail and the iPhone as well.