FernyB

Today, I started a new project. A minimalistic bug tracker that should really work under Dreamhost. The only reason I need this to work on Dreamhost is because bills begin to add up after having a few VPS accounts and I’m trying to cut my spending and since Dreamhost gives me unlimited disk space and bandwidth I figure I will use it and yes I know I can use GitHub but that cost money for private repositories.

I installed the latest rails using sudo gem install rails –version 2.3.5 and I got Capistrano all set-up and was able to deploy. Now the only thing that took almost all day was trying to figure out why rails would not process the request. So I did “rake rails:freeze:gems” to freeze the gems. Once I did that I was having problems with Rack version 1.0 already activated and I hacked around RubyGems to see if I can deactivate it but I didn’t find anyway of doing that. I also googled a ton of searched but found nothing.

What did work was to modify the rails core, ActionController to be specific in file:

vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller.rb

I modified lines 34 and 35 and commented them out.
I then added the following:

load "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack.rb"

the end result look like this:

#gem 'rack', '~> 1.0.1'
#require 'rack'
load "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/gems/rack-1.0.1/lib/rack.rb"

which after doing that, it ALL worked well. Now I can continue with building my app.

It’s been a little over 4 months of development for my iPhone app. This does not mean just coding for the iPhone app but also working on the back-end server side, creating an API for Skatr to use, and later  become a public API for others to consume.

Things I did for the 4 months of development.

First month, Start from scratch to rewrite www.skatr.us from PHP over to Ruby using the Merb Framework. Although that went short after the announcement of Merb & Rails merge. I figured I needed to port things over to Rails now because eventually Merb will be less supported and the other reason was I already know Rails and Merb was sometimes challenging because I did not know it.

Second Month, Write lots of code to port it form Merb over to Rails and Begin writing the API that will be consumed by Skatr. Also go shopping for a Web Host to host the Web App. I started to re-read books I had on Objective-C and Cocoa and bought a few books and screencasts on iPhone development and paid $99 to Apple to be part of the iPhone Developer program. Started writing code for Skatr.

Third Month, Write Ruby Code and Objective-C code for Skatr Web and Skatr iPhone, Also make a ton of google searches to learn how things are done in iPhone land.

Fourth Month, Complete writing Skatr for iPhone and the web API for Skatr.

It was actually a lot of work doing all this considering I was working at my full-time job and not just a 8 hour job but a few days with emergency releases working over 10 hours. Also to mention it takes me almost a little under 2 hours to commute from work to home because of traffic and then I would continue with my iPhone app till usually around 12:00 AM sometimes 1:00 AM and other days when literally my eyelids where already closed and realizing I’m sleeping and I need to go to bed. It was very tiring. Then wake up early for work and continue the same pattern for about 4 months.

Now that Skatr is completed. I’ve submitted it to Apple, hoping it does not get rejected. Let’s see what happens now. Then hopefully take a vacation?

As I wrote earlier, I was trying to release skatr.us on the first of january but unfortunately that is not going to happen. I just don’t have the strength to pull it off.. I’m going to push back the release date for Skatr for mid February, I think that is a good enough time, thats like 8 full-days to work on it plus whatever time I have after work. I’m sure I’ll get it done, it’s better than half-complete.

Happy New Year!

So the day as come and gone. LA Ruby was a hit. This time it was over at Los Angeles Times building in Downtown Los Angeles CA. It was great to see many new people. It continues to grow. More good things are coming along the way. I met some guys from a startup called Vokle.com and they are using Merb instead of Rails. The idea behind it sounds cool. So I’ve posted a their video and the music for it awesome.

LA Ruby Meetup was very cool. So I was the first to be at the scene. I helped bring the food to the room since I was in the lobby and greeted by Jody. I meet and greeted all of the LA Times people. Also meet some guy from Yahoo!, sorry I forgot your name already, and one from heroku, BizQuest another from PGP, and another from Experian. As-well as more but I sorta forgot everyones name already… or at least I can’t remember them, yet.

If you’re in the Los Angeles Area check it out.
Yellowpages.com will be hosting LA Ruby Meetup #2 on July 17 2008, so mark that in your calendar. Join the Yahoo Group, LARuby

Less than one week after the release of Rails 2.1, was launched in Brazil the first book describing all the new features of this release.

After the launch of the book in Portuguese, the Brazilian community united to translate the book into English.

Done! A gift from all Brazilian Railers to the international community.

www.nomedojogo.com

So I received an invite for heroku a while ago. I never really used it. Want an invite to check out heroku.com? I have many invites to give away. Want one? just leave your email and I will send you one your way!

Dreamhost now supports mod_rails Passanger.

So even if you have never set-upped a Rails Application to Production server there is still hope for you. Introducing Passenger a mod_rails for Apache… Make it super simple to deploy apps just like PHP. Check it out over at modrails.com 

New Feature out now. Add your last.fm friends radio stations and playlist.

New Feature for LastBridge.net – I have added a small list of station you can now select.

Of course more new features are planned ahead.

It is official LastBridge.net is out for public consumption! Again for those who are lost and don’t know what this “LastBridge” is it’s for listening to your last.fm radio stream on the Roku SoundBridge.I have made a screencast on How To use LastBridge. If anyone still needs help or just want to leave your opinions on this project, leave a comment or two. Thanks.Enjoy!

www.LastBridge.net

What? What is this? Well, yeah… it is another project of mine. I call it LastBridge, like the name? its original… anyways.. So LastBridge is a web app for users of the Roku SoundBridge like myself. Basically you can listen to your last.fm music on the SoundBridge without having to install anything or hosting any files. I previously wrote the same thing in a much cheaper less good looking way, in PHP. This time I have rewritten it using Ruby On Rails. As soon as I release it make sure to check it out.

Wow, you don’t see rants like this every day. Zed Shaw, who created Mongrel, a library and web server that just about everyone uses to serve rails applications, is basically a God in the Rails community. In a post today called “Rails Is A Ghetto” he tears into a number of leading Rails developers, the community in general, and a number of startups (and Google).via Techcrunch

If you’re just getting into Rails or you’re not entirely clear on the whole REST thing, as I was, take a look at Gregg’s video presentation over at railsenvy.com It’s good.