Trying to get onto the Sofa

I’ve started going through the CouchDB book’s chapters on setting up their tutorial app, Sofa. It starts at Chapter 5. The first thing out of the gate that I had an issue with was running this command:
sudo easy_install couchapp

For those uninitiated, easy_install is part of python, and doesn’t work unless you’ve installed python-setuptools. Install’d and fix’d! The second issue was, not surprisingly, trying to run the following:
git clone git://github.com/jchris/sofa.git

It was easily remedied by installing git-core, but it would be nice if they’d listed off some additional dependencies beforehand. It’s kind of like Joel Spolsky’s post on how controlling your environment makes you happy:

So that’s what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.

And I started to learn that the days when I was happiest were the days with lots of small successes and few small frustrations.

I’ve had a bunch of tiny successes so far, but man, I’d love to eliminate those tiny frustrations.

Anyway, I digress. Back to that git command… having never used git before, but understanding the basics of it, I know it’s going to drop a bunch of files into a directory for me. But do those files need to be in a specific directory on my machine? I sure hope not, because I just saved them into a subdirectory of my home. At least they were kind enough to include an image of a bird to help me relax. (It’s almost like they saw this coming.)