Thomas On Rails: Category Rails

New Toy

Codejoy — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:18:07 -0500

I finished my latest toy, and after 17 days of trying to get it deployed finally did. Huge pain in the rear. In either case I will announce it shortly. I also would like to stop for a second and point out the fact that Typo's ability to filter spam sucks. It says "allow for non-ajax comments", leaving it unchecked is supposed to limit spam NOT! This is horrid, and I would like to take this moment to say that spammers should be beaten to death with their own shoes.

Success!!!!

Codejoy — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 09:52:00 -0600

Finally, got rails and ruby and rflickr and RMagick all playing nice together... it took a bit but in the end I got it done. The drawinports way is the way I chose, and it worked well. The process is roughly like:

Use the MacOS X cd's to install the X11SDK package, and then the x11 package. This package (the x11 one) is hard to find, its on the cd in the "other packages" .mpkg file. Though I don't have the cd on me now so let me double check that name.

After thats done, you can get darwinports and follow the instructions here:

http://blog.nanorails.com/articles/2006/07/11/installing-rails-on-mac-os-x-tiger

A few gotcha's with RMagick, if you install it with the gem apparently you need to use: require 'rubygems' before the require 'RMagick'

Then you can install rflickr by calling:


sudo gem install rflickr --remote

and Instead of:

require_gem 'rflickr' do require 'flickr' as per here:

http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?thread_id=11449&forum_id=4256

So all that to say I now have Ruby On Rails working with RadRails on my macOSX tiger intel core 2 duo. w00t

Ruby on Rails and MacOS X

Codejoy — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:40:00 -0600

So I decided I need to get ruby on rails running...I did get it running using the one click install called "locomotion", but my curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to use radrails. It was soon apparent that a normal install of Rails was needed so off to the net I go to find out all the info. It turns out darwinports is used to get this ruby on rails thing going, and I follow this nice guide here to do so. Now for the problem, it turns out that I am getting this error when I try to install ruby gems, apparently after some hunting it turns out the darwinports version of gems is broke (sudo port install rb-rubygems). Turns out much to my suprsie this is documented and you can google the exact error you get when you try to (sudo gem install -y rails). Now folks for the bad news, all the "fixes" I found on the net, all the things that said "oh ya its easy just do this...or change that line here" don't work. I realized I don't exactly recall installing ruby, as per the tutorial I used...it was already installed so perhaps things are getting mis matched for locations of install paths *shrug*, I am not a linux enough guru yet to figure all this out, so far. Rails is not working as it should...It seems to be in Locomotive but not on its own :( Hopefully I will be able to have a better report soon...

Ruby for Rails

Codejoy — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 15:51:00 -0600

I am finally getting serious about Ruby, and Rails as i just went out and bought the book "Ruby for Rails". So far I am not that far into it, but I have my rails environment set up on my Ubuntu install, and once my macbook gets in there too. The most important Gems I use when using Ruby is: The RMagick gem (image manipulation) and the rFlickr gem (flickr API gem). I have a few flickr toy ideas ruminating in my head so I will have to start seriously to get to coding on this. I have decided of all the web technologies out there, Rails is the one I want to become pro on. This is a hard choice, as I most likely will not use it at work ever (they are mostly JSF). Such is life...choose life, choose rails.

RoR != Depression.

Codejoy — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:07:00 -0500

I might of jumped the gun, I figured the flickr links not working was operator error. But several things came together at onceu to make me think it was just flat out dead, it turns out had just the logging been working I would of seen the error instantly: "Expired api key for flickr api", WHA????? I double check, and it seems the installed flickr gem had someone elses' flickr api key in the flickr.rb file. A change of that, and not only am I back up and running but I am getting statistics too! :) Woo Hoo! :D Now if I could just stop the spam from coming in... :(

RoR = Depression On Rails

Codejoy — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:09:00 -0500

For no reason that I can discern, my ruby on rails warholit application stopped working with flickr based links. That would be fine had I mucked with the code that parses the URL or anything, but nope I haven't touched any of that since it was first determined to be working. This is annoying for that reason, I guess I have to now unload my app from online down to my local box somehow and start playing with it (as my logging events aren't working anymore either *Shrug*). High irritating to have code stop working for no reason. I thought perhaps the flickr API changed to render my flickr.rb gem obsolete, but that would be insane to change an API and break your clients around the world. grrrrr....

Noobies first impression of his first RoR project.

Codejoy — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:18:00 -0500

First of all, I have never done web programming before, and really never had the inclination. That all has changed with Ruby on Rails. For many reasons, first and foremost is the price of entry. It is relatively easy to get started in RoR and deployment to a webhost isn't to bad. My host is HostingRails.com. They have some sweet deals for free or near free web hosting and very helpful staff. I recomend them a great deal.

Warholit! was my first forray into Ruby on Rails. For the other newbie rails users, I would like to distribute some tips and lessons learned. (this is a lessons learned from warholit, mostly a stupid list of all the gotchas that I ran into while stepping into the Ruby on Rails waters with this project):

Keep your development machine and webhosc always running at the same version
Remember on your web host, if your application just doesnt seem to start from the web browser, try from the command prompt of your web host % >script/console
Something in particular this project: RMagick has two modes Q8 and Q16, if you are doing an operation on your dev machine that looks funky on the web host, double check what version you have of RMagick and find a work around for converting.
Multiple Applications can run on a single host usually, though you have to do funky stuff. I put this here cause i was never sure if this was true or not, it indeed ist rue and the host should help you to set that up. Typically it invovles haveing one RoR app that contains another ina subdirectory, the routes and perhaps some other stuff make setting this up difficult at times, but well worth it. I am currently running typo, and within that my RoR flickr toy "Warholit"

I would also like to take a moment to state that Typo (what powers this blog) is awesome. It's adminstrative functions are lovely and very web 2.0 :). So I guess my number one tip for those new to Ruby on Rails is first, spend some time developing simple and fun Ruby scripts. Then after that, find a great book that shows you Ruby on Rails, I hear "Ruby for Rails" is a great book (though I learned all my stuff using the "Agile web development with Rails" book (not so bad)). The biggest trouble I had when starting out was learning how to pass arguments from web page to Ruby script and back again. I will release some sourcecode to my warholit app after it has matured a bit more to demonstrate this. (I also found it quite difficult at first to figure out how to use check boxes and option boxes).

All in all I am happy with Ruby on Rails. It is a fun new way to code, and as someone who has always wanted to write web apps makes the barrier to entry very low. My biggest concern was how I was going to coax my webhost into allowing me to host multiple rails applictions (like this typo blog AND my warholit app) but with some help and some knowhow, it was a very doable thing at no extra cost. For those who have always wanted to try Web Development, I think ruby on rails is the way to go, but now I guess I am officially a biased opinion :)

Warhol it! V1.1

Codejoy — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:23:41 -0500

I would like to announce Warhol It! V1.1 . It is finished! Finally, big thanks to HostingRails.com for all their help in supporting me to get it up and running on their new speedy servers. So now I can finally continue sprucing up this blog some. Have Fun!

Sorry...

Codejoy — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:01:00 -0500

Well, its now saturday and I am still stumped as to what is going on. So if you found this through the flickr group Warhol it! lookin for the flickr toy, hang in there. It is coming. You can even goto http://www.thomasonrails.com/warholit/ to get a preview now, only problem is it won't send back the image (hence the problem im having is a huge one yes.). But you can see the direction the toy (and any future toys I cook up) is going.

In the meantime, perhaps i'll post a video of me like tap dancing or something...so the entertainment value remains the same. Tonight I plan on burning some midnight oil and trying to hack at it some more to get it to work.

No joy

Codejoy — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:21:00 -0500

Well it seems that freezing (or unpacking) the gems to 1.1.2 didn't matter nor fix it. So this is a bummer as my flickr toy is still not working. ;(