Archive for May, 2008
I have a Core Duo model and am running windows (w/ bootcamp), so some of this stuff probably doesn’t apply but …
1. The hard drive is painfully slow. When you go to delete something, you can sit there for a good 5 seconds before the delete dialog is gone
2. You can only run an external 2.5 inch hard drive off one particular USB port (the one to the right) … if you put it on any other port, it will not get enough power and be stuck powering up then powering down. Or it will power up and stay fine for a bit, until it suddenly starts experiencing the situation I’ve described.
3. Maximum installable RAM … 2 Gigabytes.
god.
4. While you can get up to 4 hours of power running OS X on the battery … you’ll barely get 2 hours running Windows.
note: This is a late night rant … I love my darling MacBook Pro.
May 25th, 2008
undefined method `rewrite' for "":String
If you get this error, and the error message is pointing you to a “link_to” call or something similar, then you may be using an instance variable that’s called ‘@url’ too.
This blog post did talk about the problem but it seemed limited to models only. I finally discovered that, in my case, I was using ‘@url’ in the controller for the view where I was making the ‘link_to’ call.
Long story short, if you see this error, comb through your code (models, controllers and views) for any variables that are called ‘@url’ and change them.
May 16th, 2008
Dreamhost now supports the use of mod_rails on their shared hosting plans
The Phusion team contacted me with a working test version of Passenger a couple of months ago and since then DreamHost has been helping out with testing and ironing out lingering deployment issues. The Phusion team has been very helpful and responsive throughout the process and I think we will see a lot more great things from them in the future.
Now to the important part… how do you use Passenger on DreamHost?
Briefly, all you do is enable the Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails) option for any existing or new web domain in the DreamHost web control panel. When you then point that domain’s web directory to the public directory of an existing Ruby on Rails application it will work automatically. For more detailed information, check out our Passenger wiki page.
May 14th, 2008
I ran into a “bad system call” error while trying to run Apache2 on cygwin.
I had installed Apache 1.3 and Apache 2 using cyg-apt, but when I went to start the Apache 2 server, I kept getting this error.
Of course, I set off to fix this and after googling for a while, I found out that to fix the “bad system call” error you have to set the CYGWIN environment variable to ’server’.
The problem is, no one actually tells you one of two things
- How to do it
- That you have to have cygserver installed and running before hand.
First of all, set the CYGWIN environment variable.
Start by going to the root of your cygwin install and open cygwin.bat
Now insert this line in it
set CYGWIN=server
save the file and restart your cygwin shell (more information on setting the CYGWIN environment variable)
Now type cygserver-config and hit enter
For me, that was enough (as you can see from the image above), but in case you need more help installing cygserver, here’s a link
After that, you just need to start the cygserver service like so
and now the command
httpd2 -k start
should work
May 8th, 2008
Insane!
May 3rd, 2008
I was going through my google analytics logs today and I noticed that a lot of folks were coming to my site on Google searches for stuff like ‘print_r + ruby on rails‘.
So I figured I’d write a blog post about it, because I’ve had the same problem.
What you’re looking for is ‘inspect’.
If you have an array, hash or object that you want to take a quick-and-dirty look at just type in
objectname.inspect
eg:
posts.inspect
or if you’re in rails just do …
render :text => posts.inspect and return false
and you’ll get an output of the contents of said array, hash or object.
Here is a screen capture of a quick irb session to show you how it works.
I hope this helps.
May 1st, 2008