andlinux = Fail (rant)

Its admirable what they’re trying to do, but I installed the software and couldn’t get it to run. (Strange “could not connect” errors)

After screwing around with their rather unhelpful help thread and losing 2 hours of my life I gave up and uninstalled it. Don’t waste your time like I did, until they at least figure out how to make the darned thing work right out the box.

Thats probably why I hadn’t heard about them until a few days ago, and then, entirely by accident.

Use BREAD not CRUD

From Paul m. Jones

“I don’t recall where I first heard the term BREAD; it stands for “browse, read, edit, add, delete”. That covers more of what common web apps do, including the record listings. It even sounds nicer: “crud” is something icky, but “bread” is warm and fulfilling. That’s why I tend to use the term BREAD instead of CRUD …”

I like BREAD.
🙂

gem install error – ‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command

UPDATE: See my new blog post on the issue

If you’re here,  you are probably getting an error like this during a gem install on a windows box.

cl -c  -nologo -O1 -MD -Zi -DNDEBUG -DWIN32 -D_CONSOLE -DNO_STRICT -DHAV
E_DES_FCRYPT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_CONTEXT -DPERL_IMPLICIT_SYS -DPERL_MSVCRT_READFIX –
O1 -MD -Zi -DNDEBUG    -DVERSION=\”6.4\”  -DXS_VERSION=\”6.4\”  -IC:\Perl\lib\CO
RE  BitVector.c
‘cl’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
NMAKE :  U1077:
Stop.

The fix is easy if you have visual studio or the .NET SDK installed.

If you don’t then either go download Visual Studio Express or the .NET SDK (anyone out of 1.1, 2.0 or 3.5 should do)

Now, do a search on your local machine for ‘cl.exe’ Continue reading

Zed Shaw is a fan of Phusion Passenger (modrails)

Its old but I stumbled onto this just today. Zed Shaw (the creator of that ol’ faithful Ruby server mongrel) is a fan of the Apache Passenger (modrails) guys

I also met the Phusion Passenger guys and holy fucking crap are they on to something. If anyone is going to actually take on Mongrel in the hosting area it’s Passenger. The developers are super cool nice guys (unlike me) and even DHH likes their stuff. He really never liked anything I built, so hopefully those guys get more support. About the only thing keeping them from taking over is that they use forking so a few libraries that keep resources open will have serious problems. They’ll probably have to think up some kind of thing for that soon, but I think most Rails deployments could get pretty far with Passenger. Continue reading

New mod_rails/passenger memory tools and cool tutorial

I’ve been mucking around with passenger quite a bit these days. I’ve got two staging servers running it for two different projects and another running a production version of one of those projects.

In digging through the documentation I discovered two new command line tools that come included with the 2.0 version of Passenger.

From the documentation
passenger-status

One can inspect Phusion Passenger’s internal status with the tool passenger-status. This tool must typically be run as root. For example:

Continue reading

How to persevere … correctly

I just had to steal this 37 signal blog posting

How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.

Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.

Continue reading

Current Active Scaffold Rails plugin (1.1.1) not compatible with Rails 2.1

If you’re seeing errors like this

... gems/activesupport-2.1.0/lib/active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:31:in `alias_method': undefined method `find_full_template_path' for class `ActionView::Base' (NameError)

You’re not crazy.
Active Scaffold (1.1.1) doesn’t play nice with Rails 2.1!

Go here to get an Active Scaffold version (master) that does.

Fixing the libxml-ruby gem error: uninitialized constant XML (NameError)

I found the highly recommended libxml-ruby gem but was having a lot of trouble getting my sample code below to work

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require 'libxml'
doc = XML::Document.file('http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=obama')
root = doc.root
puts "Root element name: #{root.name}"

I kept getting this error

uninitialized constant XML (NameError) Continue reading