Ruby Red Bricks

I find this relaxing..

Take a problem space and map it out as a directed graph.

Connect bits (nodes) together, one connection at a time:

Red -> Green; Green -> Blue; Blue -> Red;

connects these colours in a triangle of associations. Other connections are possible.

Last Friday. My day off. My unpaid, day off work.

I was thinking about work…

I was thinking about all the things that go into a platform.

And I ended up thinking that a platform was no more than a series of related decisions

And it all got too weird and wolly.

But before then, I chilled out with this:

digraph g {
node [shape = record,height=.1];
service_stack;
servers -> service_stack;
onsite_servers -> servers;
hosted_servers -> servers;
physical_servers -> onsite_servers;
virtual_servers -> onsite_servers;
virtual_servers -> hosted_servers;
native_operating_systems -> physical_servers;
os_x -> native_operating_systems;
win -> native_operating_systems;
linux -> native_operating_systems;
virtual_operating_systems -> virtual_servers;
linux -> virtual_operating_systems;
java_vm -> os_x;
java_vm -> win;
java_vm -> linux;
community_java_projects -> java_vm;
community_ruby_projects -> jruby;
community_rails_projects -> rails;
java -> java_vm;
jruby ->java_vm;
rails -> jruby;
web -> rails;
mobile -> rails;
android -> mobile;
iphone -> mobile;
mobile_web -> mobile;
connect -> rails;
}

It doesn’t represent something real – just some thoughts. Note the weak spot.

If I can figure out why mephisto aint letting me get to assets then I’ll post the rendered version up. Otherwise, please use graphviz.

Oh, I love being back in Windows land. Trying to get JRuby 1.4 working under Windows 7, I got this error when trying to install gems:

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (IOError)
  Access is denied

Seems that the JRuby installer sets permissions on the installed files that prevents the logged in user from modifying anything.

To get around this I set the permissions on the gems folder to allow the interactive user to make changes, basically giving full read-write access to local users. The location may vary on your box, but on mine it was here:

C:\Program Files\jruby-1.4.0\lib\ruby\gems

Some gems want to create links in the JRuby \bin file (Rails is an example). This requires setting more permissions, in my case here:

C:\Program Files\jruby-1.4.0\bin

And just to be safe I did the same thing for \docs:

C:\Program Files\jruby-1.4.0\docs

Now Rails and other gems install without any hassle. I still want my bash shell back..

What a crazy day.. nothing better than coming home from a mad day at the office, slaving over a hot Windows PC, and sitting down comfortably in front of a unix terminal to chill out.

We’re incredibly disorganized around the house – many, many little projects that we just seem to lose track of. Ditto for my business. Setting up a project-management tool as a mean to get things happening seemed like a good idea.. but I never seemed to find the time.. :)

I’ve tried running Rails apps on Dreamhost but they always seem to run like a dog. No offence to DH – the shared hosting is brilliant for static sites and seems to run PHP really well. But Rails always seems a bit tricky. And given that I tend to want to play with more exotic setups for Rails I really wanted something I had more control over. I looked around and at the bottom end of the VPS market most of the offerings seem pretty similar. In a toss-up between Slicehost and Linode I went with the latter purely because of some good press I’d read (and now cannot find.. maybe I dreamt it).

With a freshly-minted Linode server running, I set up a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to finally install Redmine on to. I tried setting up Rails using one of Linode’s handy-dandy scripts, but I couldn’t get it to work. Everything seemed to go OK with the script, but it failed to install Ruby (the whole point of me running it). I probably did something wrong, but the whole thing was a bit magical. I’d rather take personal responsibility for screwing up the server.

A quick googling found this excellent article for setting up Ruby on Rails, Nginx, etc. A couple of the links need to be updated, but all-in-all it worked a dream.

As per the instructions from the Inveigled Software dude (or dudess) I got the latest version of Ruby Enterprise from here:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/68719/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01.tar.gz

And modified all the references to the Ruby Enterprise source.

The nginx initialization script has escaped " and & tokens all over the place, and these have to be replaced with ” or && respectively.

Went through the rest of the instructions and had an Nginx install working in minutes. So far the whole Linode experience has been a good one. Next step, getting Redmine installed and running..