What I learned last night:

• Upgrading my operating system (on a Mac) lost me the command-line tools from XCode.
• Yes, I remember this was a problem last time around but everything had been going so smoothly that I forgot.
• Mysterious errors: why wasn’t Nokogiri working anymore? It totally worked last time. What’s this error message about libiconv? (Yep, I upgraded in New York so that I could use Matlab, and being on the road until last week I hadn’t touched anything that depended on Nokogiri.)
• Well, Nokogiri actually has a really useful installation page! It explicitly addresses that libiconv error, reminding me of the command-line tools problem. Easily fixed.

I was going through this to update my Softcover installation, as I’m curious about using Softcover to create books that use LaTeX and publish nicely to HTML, epub, mobi, and pdf. For this kind of thing — books in chapters with subchapters, sections, figures, tables — you really do need some sort of structure on an almost mechanical level, and XML and HTML are such structures. But then how do you read parts from your book, putting it together and taking it apart in the appropriate ways? Nokogiri is a package of code that parses HTML, XML, and more. It’s pretty important to the way Softcover works.

One other problem with the Softcover install: putting epubcheck-3.0 in the right place. The installation instructions say “put it in your path!” but I found some difficulty as simply putting it in my path did not render it discoverable to the softcover check process. This discussion helped a bit — putting it in /bin/ worked nicely.

Now I just need to figure out why “softcover server” is not working…. all the hints I’ve seen to deal with “in `start_tcp_server’: no acceptor (port is in use or requires root privileges) (RuntimeError)” have failed to address the problem.