Hi, I'm Phil Freo

I recently had to look at two different legal documents (PDFs) that were mostly the same, but I wanted to spot any differences.

My first attempt was to install the cross-platform GUI tool DiffPDF. This mostly worked but was annoying because it seemed to basically only diff within a page – so if your paragraph bumped to another page in the new version of the document, you couldn’t really spot changes.

Then I installed pdftotext with macports: “sudo port install poppler”. From there you can diff the two text files, like normal.

I just got a sweet new MacBook Pro Retina – way faster than my old MBP. I wanted to do a clean install rather than restoring from a TimeMachine backup, which meant reinstalling software and manually transferring stuff over that I really needed. I kept a list…

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This weekend I upgraded OS X from Lion to Mountain Lion. Documenting steps I had to do to get all my development environments working with MacPorts.

Steps:

• First installed the latest XCode via the Mac App Store
• Downloaded/Installed Mountain Lion
• Launched XCode one to so I could agree to license, etc.
• MacPorts also requires the XCode Command Line tools which are a separate install. Inside XCode preferences: “Instead, they can be installed optionally using the Components tab of the Downloads preferences panel as shown in” (source)
• Had to run “sudo xcodebuild -license” after getting “Error: org.macports.build for port libunwind-headers returned: command execution failed”. Run this, scroll down, type agree.
• sudo port selfupdate
• sudo port upgrade outdated
• Everything finished and worked properly except MongoDB. Currently there’s a bug and the easiest/best work around seems to be just manually installing the latest stable OS X version from http://www.mongodb.org/downloads and manually copying the binaries into /opt/local