I’ve been dealing with this insanely frustrating problem for a few weeks now. I do most of my Rails development on my Mac, but run instances on both Linux and Windows XP. XP has burned me until I won the battle this evening. I was able to install Rails through a manual process a [...]

I’m a sucker for personalization.  I’m not talking about having my initials engraved on a watch or golf ball, but things like ring tones, desktop backgrounds, and custom wheels on my Beetle (the important things ;).  I view personalization as a form of self-expression and it also creates product appeal.  Jamie’s product line is a [...]

A few days ago I was testing a Rails app on Fedora Core and ran into a slight problem.  You could actually call it a major problem since I was unable to talk to MySQL and instantiate any model objects.  Sometimes serious problems seem a little less serious when the fix is pretty straight-forward.  Lucky [...]

Lately I’ve been using the Ruby console to test my Rails models and application logic. It’s a very handy utility that I’ve only touched the surface of and wanted to post a simple example.
Let’s assume that you’ve created a test application with a model named Contacts. The contacts database has the basic structure:
id int [...]

I’ve been doing a fair amount of Rails development on OS X over the past year. During this time Rails has undergone a significant amount of development. When I initally installed Rails on OS X the current version was 1.0.0. This has been great until I recently ran into a problem with the acts_as_taggable plugin.
This [...]

I’ve been evaluating a few on-line collaboration tools built on Rails.  The most recent one I’ve looked into is ProjectLounge Lite.  It’s completely open source so I decided to give it a run on OS X.  Since I was unable to download a zip file I decided to checkout the project using Subversion.  Unfortunately I [...]

If you’re looking to develop applications centered around mapping then check out Google’s enterprise mapping solution. It’s really no different than the standard developer API other than the fact that it’s not free and the licensing terms are different (you still use the same developer API). This means that you can integrate Google [...]

Zach recently posted a comment about configuring Rails to work with FastCGI on GoDaddy servers.  By default GoDaddy has Rails configured to work with standard CGI, which is drastically slower than FastCGI.  After using the tips Zach posted I was able to get FastCGI running and now the performance of the app is incredible.
Here are [...]

This is just a random tidbit, but I thought it was pretty cool.  I’m not sure if this is a hidden easter egg or actual functionality.  I was recently working in Eclipse and after an interesting keyboard sequence I was typing from right to left.  No matter what I typed within the current document it [...]

I’ve added a few posts talking about the shortcomings of GoDaddy’s Rails configuration. While most of the issues I’ve dealt with are acceptable, there’s one that’s not. I recently contacted GoDaddy about having my Rails app live in the webroot. This means that users would be able to access this via http://mydomain.com. It turns out [...]