#Ruby

I’m noticing an interesting trend amongst geeks in the last year. A lot of them are rolling their own CMSs as a learning exercise and for their own personal sites. And most of them have a few things in common :

1. They publish to static html or minimally, build static files and don’t have a database
2. The source files are straight up text, markdown, textile or they’re using an editor like MarsEdit, Ecto or TextMate through XML-RPC to post
3. It then deploys or rsync’s for them from a local copy (a la capistrano or rake)
4. It’s all source code version controlled with rollbacks (a la git)
5. Backups are a snap
6. Portable (as in, copy or deploy files over to a new hoster)

Now I can respect and totally understand this since, I do dev and have to admit before I put my migrated wordpress installation under git and capistrano deploy it would have been an utter pain to manage.

I recently reinstalled mysql on my Macbook under OSX 10.5 Leopard and used the 64 bit MySQL (hey, Leopard is 64 bit! Why not?).

Anyhow, when I went to using rails again, mongrel_rails start kept throwing a whine on the fact that the old mysql gem (2.7) was 32 bit.

Found this after removing the old gem to get it working with 64 bit. Definitely not trivial to figure out:

I’m not sure if anyone but a close bunch of friends noticed, but I took the blog down while I was moving some things around in the background here. Nothing big, but moved a few subdomains over to the excellent slicehost and off my old hoster TextDrive (now Joyent).

They’re still excellent, but they’re not about to upgrade their old BSD boxes and it was getting to be a bit difficult with working with new stuff like git and rails 2.0.

Past posts have probably nailed me by this point as a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and the Ruby language in particular.

While I think a huge mythology now surrounds how much more productive it makes you which causes difficulty in separating the hype from reality, my personal experience has made me a raver about it in terms of just getting things done. In one (ok, mostly sleepless) weekend, I managed to get up a canvassing and get out the vote application, web enabled across the internet that was used successfully and to great effect in a Canadian federal leadership campaign (and the person ran rings around the other candidate partly because of its contribution). The party in question had been unable in several years of trying to accomplish the same thing.

Wow. I’m going to say this again, because it is so rare for me to use this word in relation to programming at all: Wow.

In fact, the last time I used it was in regard to my first view of XCode whose ability to remove the grunt work from creating interfaces and allow you to concentrate on coding instead is amazing (sadly though, I’m not a big fan of ObjectiveC and you really need to code in ObjC to get XCode’s full power… though apparently someone has come up with Ruby bindings for Cocoa which I am also going to check out since Ruby seems to save so much pain.