A few weeks back I posted about getting the ruby-debug-ide gem installed in Windows under Ruby 1.8.6.  In that post I outlined how hacking a header file and using the Visual C++ 2008 compiler could be leveraged to get the gem built and installed properly.  Well, after a helpful comment from a reader and watching a few screencasts over on TekPub, I actually found a way to do this with Ruby 1.9.1 from RubyInstaller.org. As you know, I swapped my Windows development environment for Mac OSX, and so far learning Rails has been a great pleasure thanks to Agile Web Development with Rails (Third...

I’ve been stuck for a while now.  There are so many amazing technologies and frameworks out there, and I’ve finally decided to devote some serious time to one of the best (in my opinion) which is Rails.  I know I’ve talked about this in the past, and, frankly, I’ve been either too busy or too lazy to seriously devote time to it.  But this year I’ve decided to make a resolution to seriously learn Rails by rebuilding this blog with it.  I know there are a million blog platforms out there, especially when you consider the fact that every geek seems to write their own. ...

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...

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...

Over the past couple days I’ve been reading what’s shaping up to be an excellent book about Ruby on Rails called “Agile Web Development with Rails (Third Edition).”  This book takes a practical approach to teaching Rails by building a demonstration shopping cart application called “Depot.”  I must say that, so far, learning Rails has been a complete pleasure.  I really enjoy the MVC methodology and the idea of “convention over configuration.”  The basic idea behind Rails is that we (as web developers) generally know what we’re doing, and we can follow some...