I ran into a problem installing Rails on XP and decided to do it manually.  Luckily there’s support for this and it’s documented here.  Simply download the listed gems and install in the recommended order.  Scroll down to the “Manual Installation” section of the link above.  You’ll need to download each gem and then run gem install gemname for each one.  It’s a little extra work, but works flawlessly.

I recently helped another developer who was trying to integrate JavaScript with Flash. I recommended using ExternalInterface and pointed him to a couple of links. He emailed me a few hours later saying he had everything linked in, but couldn’t get the example to work correctly. After troubleshooting the problem I realized the allowScriptAccess parameter was set to sameDomain. This won’t work when accessing the page from the local file system, but only when accessed from a webserver (ie http://localhost/external.htm). To get this working the allowScriptAccess parameter needs to be changed to always. This seems trivial, but after an hour’s worth of investigation I stumbled across the answer.

So I broke down and decided to run one of my beta apps on GoDaddy’s new Rails account.  I was extremely pleased to see that GoDaddy offers Rails hosting, but it turns out there’s a lot to be done from a configuration standpoint.

On the GoDaddy site it mentions they use FastCGI, but when I looked through their .htaccess files references are made to dispatch.cgi instead of dispatch.fcgi.  Another issue is the path to the Ruby binary.  On my Mac, the binary lives at /usr/bin/ruby while on GoDaddy’s servers it’s located at /usr/local/bin/ruby.  I found this through trial and error, which cost me about an hour.  Maybe they should consider documenting that somewhere.
The other problem that I’m currently trying to resolve is the configuration to get incoming requests routed to my controllers.  Right now I can access the index.html page located in the public directory, but any requests made to my controllers end up failing.  I’ve been working with GoDaddy for about three days now and am growing frustrated.

I will post the ultimate results of my findings once I (or they) can get the issue resolved.  I’ve wasted a tremendous amount of time on what should be a somewhat trivial task.  The worst part is that their help docs make it sound so easy.  I’m wondering how many Rails applications have been deployed on their servers because everyone has to running into this brick wall.

Hopefully I can get to the bottom of the issue and prevent others from wasting as much time as I have so far.  It appears that switching from WEBrick to FastCGI is more difficult than I originally expected.

If you’ve worked with layouts in Rails then you’re most likely familiar with @content_for_layout, which basically substitutes the output of your view into the layout file. I was digging around earlier for some more information file and ran into an article talking about how <%= yield %> is preferred to <%= @content_for_layout %>. I can’t seem to dig up a link, but will update this post when I find it.

With that being said I’ve started using yield for my layout files, but am intrigued to know why it’s preferred. Maybe it’s the simple fact that yield seems to fall more in lines with Ruby’s intuitive language syntax. Speculation aside, it’s a simple change to make and you have nothing to lose in making it.

Just a quick post to say that we launched the new SensorLogic site earlier this week.  It’s clean, simple, and does a better job of conveying what we actually do.  Check out the solutions page to understand what markets we’re targeting and some of our recent projects.  If you click the “Let’s Get Started” button on the homepage you can see a demo of one of our applications.  Much more exciting news is planned in the coming months, so be sure to keep an eye on us!