I looked all over and couldn’t find a bash script which could check and if missing install a list of gems. I had to hack my own up:

GEMS=( `cat gems.txt` ) # gems.txt has one gem name per line

for gem in "${GEMS[@]}"; do
  found=`gem list $gem | grep -i $gem`
  if [ "$found" != "" ]; then
    parts=( $found )
    echo "Found ${parts[0]} ${parts[1]}"
    continue
  fi

  echo "---------------------------"
  echo "Installing $gem"
  sudo gem install $gem -y
  echo "---------------------------"
done

If you are installing RadRails on Aptana and getting ‘org.mozilla.rhino’ error, you are probably upgrading your old installation. Searching for all files related to Aptana and deleting them before installing new version should fix the problem.

After uninstalling older version of Aptana, I had over 110MB left in the ‘Programs Files/Aptana’ folder. I’m not sure where the files are kept on a *nix platform or OSX though.

I’m getting married in a couple of hours and then off to Europe So I will probably not be posting anything until I get back first week of August.

Linotype FontExplorer X is my recent discovery and I find it to be the best font management tool out there. All of the sudden I started getting “xpcom.dll” error on startup. Googling didn’t turn up anything so I spent some time and narrowed down the problem.

The application must be started from its folder, ie C:\Program Files\Linotype FontExplorer X. It looks that the menu shortcut is created without “Start in” filled in. All you have to do is to find the shortcut in the start menu, right click and set “Start in” value. After that it should work.

$ mc

I’m in love with Midnight Commander. In fact, I’ve been a huge fan of dual panel interface since good old Norton Commander and later a far superior Dos Navigator. Far Manager is the very first thing I install after installing Windows.

Midnight Commander makes it a pleasure to navigate remote host but very few IPSs actually install it.

I didn’t think this moment would come this soon for me. I’ve only been playing with Rails and Ruby for about 3 months.

I did some growing up as a Rails developer last night when I had to change Rails core for Noobkit.

Testing ‘production’ at 3am right before I “quickly” put up the new build brought up a problem with page caching. Noobkit is using URLs which include ‘::’ characters in their paths and silly Rails tries to create fragment cache files with those characters in the path.

That resulted in an obscure and very non descriptive error Errno::EINVAL. This had to be fixed, and so it was:

module NoobkitCaching
  def self.append_features(base)
    base.extend(ClassMethods)
  end

  module ClassMethods
  private
    def page_cache_file(path)
      super.gsub(/::|^/, '')
    end
  end
end

# and then in environment.rb
ActionController::Base.send :include, NoobkitCaching

A little bit of restyling goes a long way. I love the Simpa theme from ifelse.co.uk, but it seems to be everywhere these days. I suppose that’s the price of success. A little bit of damask, a new font for those on Vista and it’s done.

If you want some for your own site, this page has almost 300 tileable damask patterns.

I’ve recently upgraded my workstation at home and among other things installed Vista. On XP I’ve always used UltraMon but on Vista it proved to be somewhat less than stable and I had to figure out something else. Read the rest of this entry »

… Ruby on Rails.

That’s right, I’m doing most of my off hours development in Ruby on Rails now. Of course you don’t care, and why should you? You aren’t one of three people who know me. I just think it’s very editorial of me to address the crowd as if I’m a famous .NET celebrity. And by “crowd” I mean you. Read the rest of this entry »