betweenGo

The following link is to an excellent post about Ruby symbols, especially important considering Ruby on Rails uses symbols all the time.

Understanding Ruby Symbols

On Tuesday, November 15, 2005 I will be presenting an introduction to Ruby on Rails to the ACM Greater Boston Web Tech Chapter.

The presentation is online. Though it looks like a PowerPoint presentation it’s actually just a single HTML file that is transformed into a PowerPoint-like presentation using CSS and JavaScript provided by Eric Meyer.

Upgrading to Rails 1.0

Faster Testing with Rails 1.0

Plugins in Ruby on Rails

How to Debug with Breakpoints

Ruby

1. install Ruby using the one click installer
   Note that 1.8.2-15 has a small problem, the Ruby Gems Package Manager shortcut does not work because it is pointing to ruby\bin\gemhelp.cmd which does not exist. To use the Ruby Gems Package Manager open a cmd window and then enter the gems command. Or you can create the gemhelp.cmd file which has only one line in it, cmd /k gem or download it from here.

Ruby on Rails
(see also Getting Started With Rails)

1. install rails gem (and all its dependencies)

   gem install rails --remote

2. when doing an upgrade I sometimes had to force it by doing an install of the version I wanted to upgrade to

   gem install --remote --version '0.13.1' rails

Salted Hash Login & Authentication Generator
(see also Salted Login Generator Quick Start)

1. install salted login generator gem

   gem install --remote salted_login_generator

2. install localization gem

   gem install --remote localization_generator

3. Iconv is a library used for charset conversion and required by the Salted Hash Login Generator. Download this iconv package with simple installation instructions, unzip the package, and run the installer.

   C:\tmp\iconv>setup
   Setup has detected Ruby at c:\devel\ruby
   and Windows/System32 at C:\WINDOWS/System32
   Install Iconv there? [yN] y
   cp iconv.so c:\devel\ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-mswin32
   cp iconv.dll C:\WINDOWS/System32
   cp charset.dll C:\WINDOWS/System32
   Installation successful.

   Update, the above iconv package link no longer works. Instead you have to follow the more laborious task of getting iconv.so and installing it in ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mswin32 and getting iconv.dll and installing it in C:\WINDOWS\System32. More detailed instructions can be found on the iconv in Ruby on Rails page.

RMagick
(see also RMagick Install FAQ)

1. download latest RMagick Windows gem ZIP archive from http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/
2. unzip Windows gem archive
3. go into unzipped directory and do a local gem install

   C:\tmp\RMagick-1.9.1-IM-6.2.3-win32>gem install RMagick-win32-1.9.2-mswin32.gem

4. run post installer

   C:\tmp\RMagick-1.9.1>postinstall
   RMagick 1.9.2 win32 Post Installation (see enclosed README for license information)
   detecting available fonts, writing to config/type-windows.xml...ok.
   setting MAGICK_CONFIGURE_PATH to 'c:/devel/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RMagick-win32-1.9.2-mswin32/config'.
   setting is only for current user.
   Copying 5 dlls to c:/devel/ruby/bin...done.
   all done.

MySQL

1. install MySQL 4.1 (use the Windows Essential installer)
2. create tables, for example

   mysql -u fkim -p < zipcodes.sql

phpMyAdmin
Excellent web based MySQL administration tool.

1. download phpMyAdmin package
2. unzip package and configure Apache to locate that package
3. I use phpMyAdmin for administration tasks such as creating users and databases

On Monday, November 7 MeetingKoreans.com was officially launched. This is the first site betweenGo has designed and built from the ground up using Ruby on Rails.

Within 24 hours we have received excellent feedback, had almost 20 users register, and squashed a few bugs. We look forward to seeing MeetingKoreans.com grow in both number of registered users and number of features.

MeetingKoreans.com is hosted on Dreamhost which we highly recommend. The website runs on Apache 1.3 with FastCGI enabled. The source is also hosted on Dreamhost using Subversion.

MeetingKoreans.com uses, in addition to all the standard Rails gems, the Salted Hash Login Generator gem and the RMagick ruby library interface.