.: aaron vanderzwan :.

It has been disconcertingly long since I have been so inspired, excited, courageously charged by good music… and it feels good to have it once again!

The subject of this ecstatic feeling… Cloud Cult. Many of you know that I have been a huge fan of Cloud Cult in the past, their eclectic pop sound (yeah I said it), mesmerizing syncopation, and inquisitive lyrics make me cry and dance at the same time. I was a huge fan of their 2005 release Advice From The Happy Hippopotamus, and I liked what they did in 2007 with The Meaning of 8, but it seems that while touring, painting, and saving the world (they are extreme advocates of environmentalism) they have the ability to write extremely enticing music. Feel Good Ghosts is a distinctive release for Cloud Cult, setting them well beyond the scope of most artists. I am reminded why I liked them in the first place but this time for progressing reasons.

Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes) is accessible pop music that has been ripped up by Cloud Cult and then masterfully placed back together piece by piece… how they want it to be. This is not news if you are familiar with Cloud Cult, but this album takes different shape than the others. It seems happier, a bit less wrenched over, yet still very inquisitive and prodding. They also use much more orchestral pieces than the previous albums which makes their sound extremely full, and makes me miss Nate Stehouwer a lot.

I will post a song here, hopefully they wont mind. You can listen to more Cloud Cult over here. Every song on the album is amazing, choosing which one to post was difficult (so when you get the album, make sure you listen to the last track). With that… I URGE you, buy their album. Get it at their website, $12 shipped to your door or $10 mp3 download (no iTunes music locks). eMusic also has it, if you are subscribed.

I hope you like it. Let me know what you think.

 

 Journal of the Featherless: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Problem

I know that there are a lot of dependencies that go along with installing RMagick from source on Leopard.  For this reason, I was very interested in the idea of packing all of the commands into a script and just letting it run.  If you are like me, your past with scripts has been grey at best; i.e. there always seems to be some sort of problem that kills your script. Then you have to search through it to find where it broke and you spend a lot of time aligning yourself with something that might not even work.

The reason most of these scripts will fail is that references are now broken or code deprecated. If it fails, I then have to make sure that http://whatever.com still exists and is hosting the file and version that I need. I got to thinking… so often I would like (at least) the option of using something that is a bit older, but can be run smoothly.

The ‘Dependencies’/Libraries

This packaged installer uses Ruby to install ImageMagick and RMagick, with the necessary dependencies for gif, jpg, png, freetype, tiff, libwmf (?), littlecms (?), and ghostscript (?).  It rely’s on these libraries:

JPEG:
ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz

PNG:
http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2

Freetype:
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz

TIFF:
ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz

http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz

LittleCMS:
http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz

Ghostscript:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs860/ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz

Ghostscript Fonts:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz

ImageMagick:
ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz

When I found this script these URLs were built in so that if one of the URLs didn’t work, it would break. That is fine, but it is not built to find the newest and greatest, or make sure that the newest still works with everything else. So why not just package all of those url’s libraries together and make that downloadable here. I may be breaking a law or something… (if I am let me know) but I think these are all open-source.

The Instructions

So here is how it is done.

- Download the zip (39.5 MB)
- Unpack it
- Open Terminal.app

cd /to/inside/the/unzipped/dir
ruby setup.rb

Now just let it run. (You may have to put in your password every once in a while because of the ’sudo’s).

I should also note that I had X11 (Applications > Utilities > X11) and Xcode 3.0 (Macintosh HD > Developer > Applications > Xcode) installed when I ran this script.  I am not sure how much this helped/effected the script running, but I do have these installed and runnable.

The Original

Again, a special thanks to Solomon White who originally posted this script at his blog.

Here are some other references for this technique.

John Ford:
http://www.aldenta.com/2007/11/26/installing-imagemagickrmagick-on-leopard/

Ben Reubenstein:
http://www.benr75.com/articles/2008/03/16/install-rmagick-on-mac-os-x-leopard-from-source

Here is what I found at Solomon’s website.

#!/bin/sh
curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.3.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2
tar jxvf libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2
cd libpng-1.2.22
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
cd libwmf-0.2.8.4
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz
tar xzvf lcms-1.17.tar.gz
cd lcms-1.17
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs860/ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-8.60/
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
sudo mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript

curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.8
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl --without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
sudo make install
cd ..

sudo gem install rmagick