In case you didn’t know, I use computers. A lot. Between working as a programmer, writing books, and the occasional leisure time spent playing on computers, the vast majority of my life is spent with a screen of some sort in front of it. That time means I come across and try a lot of different tools, and some of them actually make my life better. One such tool I’ve started using extensively while writing my latest book is Notability.

Today I took my name back and got Armstrong tests running on Travis CI. Travis CI is the distributed, community run continuous integration server that the Ruby community has put together. It lets you do all manner of fun things, like testing in dozens of different Ruby version configurations. You’re probably wondering what Armstrong is doing there with all of this talk of Ruby. No, I didn’t rewrite Armstrong in Rails last night.

I’m working on setting up a new (old) MacBook Pro this evening when I came across an oddity. Colors in iTerm2 were working, but not in xterm-256color mode. Both laptops are sitting on the table next to each other, so I started debugging. There’s all manner of bugs that have been reported, but no amount of tweaking my environment variables worked. Some time during the process, Xcode 3 finished installing and all of the sudden things started working.