December, 2009


18
Dec 09

Installing Ruby-Debug-IDE on Windows

Lately I’ve been trying to find a good development environment for Rails on windows.  I’ve tried several different environments, but so far, I haven’t found that sweet spot, yet.  My latest trial environment is utilizing the new NetBeans version 6.8.  I’ve used NetBeans in the past for PHP projects and I was very happy with it, so I figured if the Rails support was at least as good as the PHP support, it would be a slam dunk.  After installing NetBeans I noticed that it installs it’s own version of ruby (JRuby), which is fine for most people, I’m sure, but I prefer to have my own Ruby environment running the official Ruby releases for Windows.  Something about a Java implementation of Ruby is a turn-off for me, and besides, if I ever wanted to run an alternative Ruby implementation, it would probably end up being IronRuby because Jon Lam and Jimmy Schementi are awesome, and being able to call the .NET framework from within Ruby is very sexy.

Continue reading →


9
Dec 09

Nginx and Rails and PHP, Oh My!

As you could probably guess, my blog (and several sites of my friends) are hosted on a lovely Linux VPS provided by Linode.  I honestly can’t say enough nice things about the service and reliability I’ve received from Linode (and no they don’t pay me to speak highly of them!).  But that’s not really the point of this post.  The point is actually quite simple:  My VPS doesn’t have a lot of memory, and I’m always wary of my resource consumption.  A few months ago, I moved from Apache to lighttpd for this reason, alone.  Let’s face it… Apache is a memory hog, and that problem is well-documented, so I won’t really go into details here.  “Lighty” has served me well for the past few months, but for reasons I’m about to explain, I felt the need to move to a different platform.

Continue reading →