“rails”
7 posts under this tag.
Time is turning yet again: a beloved CIMAT teacher just send me one more of his one-every-24-months email, my 2nd out-of-school anniversary is around the corner (September 14), and today I found, via Joel1, that Rails just celebrated its second anniversary itself (yup, we were born to the web around the same date).
Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.
We’re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.
I set out to serve me. Rails is a very selfish project in that respect. It gained a lot of its focus and appeal because I didn’t try to please people who didn’t share my problems. Differentiating between production and development was a very real problem for me, so I solved it the best way I knew how.
It’s hard enough to solve your own problems with eloquence. Trying to solve other people’s problems is damn near impossible—at least to do so to the level of satisfaction that would make me interested in the solution.
That’s why we hold the notion that ”frameworks are extractions” so very dear in the Rails community. Frameworks are not designed before the fact. They’re extracted when you’ve proved to yourself that an approach works. Whenever we get ahead of ourselves and try to leap over the extraction process, we come back sorely disappointed.
I believe that’s why Rails just feels right for so many people—because it’s been used by real people for real work before we dished it out for others to reuse.
I may be besotted with infatuation right now, but I believe there’s true wisdom—hard, distilled, endlessly applicable wisdom (well, what is wisdom if not particularly broad and useful patterns?)—up there.
And as a sidenote, I propose a new dictum based on the quote’s last paragraph: Use before you reuse.
This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.
Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:
Unlike most people these days, I happened to chance upon Rails through Ruby, not the other way round. But wait, today’s reading is a tad geeky but I’m putting it up here for non-geeks to read it —particularly those, you know who you are, that don’t yet speak any computer language— so here’s some context: Rails is a tool (a web framework they call it) to make web-apps (that’s right, a meta-tool: a tool to make tools) and Ruby is the computer language in which Rails is written.
Anyway, I can’t remember how I found Ruby but I can tell you when I was certain it was something truly special: when I found Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide and, shortly thereafter, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. The first one is a most delightful, witty, unique manual of the language made out of of an acute bout of ruby-rapture and given away for free by its freakishly talented authors; the second is the exact same thing.
So, after much ado, here’s today’s reading: the first chapter of Why The Lucky Stiff’s poignant guide, Kon’nichi wa, Ruby . Technophobists worry not, this chapter doesn’t contain a line of computer code nor does it force you to install a thing, it’s just good ole prose. It is my Trojan horse to try to get you to learn Ruby (you gotta learn a computer language someday). In fact, I’m so confident in my wooden stallion that let’s do this: you only need to read the very first section (1. Opening This Book) of the chapter. If it doesn’t mesmerize you, if you don’t have the weirdest crooked grin on your face by it’s end, feel under no obligation to read any further.
Today I had decided I was finally taking Caja Negra—a political web app of mine—online after so many failed attempts (I’m so sleep deprived now that I get dizzy, really dizzy, just looking at the screen). At first I thought it was a problem with Rake and so I started by reading it’s online documentation. It proved a dead end but it turns out Rake is a pretty interesting thing (and so are Rails migrations).
I decided to read some more on the Login Engine itself, and I read, much belatedly, that it is bloated and hard to modify. That has been precisely my experience—and yet, it was very useful to me and after some friendly fisticuffs we learned to get along. Many thanks to James Adam for it.
I finally decided to start the deployment all over again, from scratch, carefully checking the tiniest step. It all narrowed down to a simple command, “rake engine_migrate ENGINE=login”, that just wouldn’t run. I found some people with the same problem but no working solution.
So I kept reading and trying all sorts of different versions of the command once in a while, like a kid magician who just can’t pronounce the incantation correctly.
Along the way, I finally found out why my blog was dead a couple of days ago. It turns out TextDrive rolled out the new version of Rails (1.1) but it was incompatible with Typo and so they rolled it back. They now advise people to freeze (new word for me) your Typo to Rails 1.0 or update to the new, compatible version of the blogging engine. Even DHH apologized in the name of the core team for all the trouble the upgrade caused. TextDrive’s Justin French, on the other hand, was as diplomatic as usual when someone expressed the caring hope that people get notified about what they should do:
The solution is not for us to provide warnings in the forums, or send out emails, or stand on top of a tall building and yell out some kind of warning and hope every one hears. The solution is for developers to take control of their own web application’s source code, rather than rely on shared server libraries that can (and should) be updated regularly.
That crankiness is actually one of the reasons I enjoy TextDrive. Masochism, they call it.
Anyway, I was definitely getting nearer. I was now sure that what I needed was to freeze my web-app to Rails 1.1. Blessed yerejm gave some instructions for how to do just that here. But the simple conjuration, “rake rails:freeze:edge REVISION=4091”, wasn’t working. I stared hopelessly at the screen for some 20 minutes, thinking about what could be the problem. Then it hit me, probably out of some small passage that I must have read in the realms of documentation I skimmed today, that last colon should probably be an underscore for me. And it all worked.
Goddamned Rails-Engines!
...
mmm… Ok, Ok… I take that back. They’re indeed very helpful but installing them locally was a true nightmare and now that I was finally ready to deploy to TextDrive they refuse to cooperate. I’ve no idea what’s going wrong. I was counting on having my (political) web-app online tonight but it seems it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, my eyes are too bleary.
And the worst thing is that it’s almost 5AM. Which means one more day I miss my yoga class. Oh well… :(
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
(I just found out there’s a pretty good song from The Beatles with the same title as this post. Heh. A nice surprise.)
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