Ruby Can’t Scale!

This weekend, during my wife’s birthday celebrations, I talked with someone about my recent programming exploits, including how much fun I’m having programming web applications in Ruby on Rails. The response: “Sure, Ruby’s fun, but it’s not really useful. It’s a cute scripting language, but it can’t scale.” Until recently, this was an opinion that I agreed with. Hell,...

RedGreen gem conflicts with Autotest when using RSpec

If you’re trying to use RSpec with Autotest in a Rails app, and get a strange error: invalid option: --autospec Test::Unit automatic runner. Usage: -e [options] [-- untouched arguments] Check whether you’re using the RedGreen colorizing gem. It seems that this conflicts somehow with the setup. The good thing is that I can turn that off and still work well since I have the autotest-growl plugin...

Populating City & State Names in a Rails App

Recently, I started working on a new project where people will need to enter city/state, as well as university details. The reasons are unimportant here except to say that entering this into a database using an input field is problematic if you need to use the database later in a programmatic fashion. It only takes one person accidentally entering their city as “New Yrok” for your database calls to start...

Ruby Gems and Snow Leopard

I’ve been getting really grumpy lately because strange things keep happening when I try to build Ruby apps– specifically on Rails. It turns out that some of my problems weren’t due to my horrible lack of competence, but instead to the fact that the Ruby installation on Snow Leopard (installed from Xtools) had some weird things going on with regards to Gems. I thought I’d throw it up here...

Rails, Authlogic, and strange errors like “user_url”

Alright, this may be obvious to you real rubologists, but I’ve only been programming in Ruby for about a week, and Rails is still a framework where I have to rebuild my projects frequently because I bork them so bad. My hope is that there’s someone else who’s as clueless as me. If that person is out there, and happens to get strange errors with Rails, maybe using Authlogic, maybe this will...