gem_plugin is clever

gem_plugin is a rubygem with a difference. Zed wrote it to allow people to easily publish plugins for his mongrel httpserver. If you create a gem with mongrel and gem_plugin as dependencies, gem_plugin will load your gem and run its init.rb after mongrel has loaded.

This makes it really easy for end users wanting to use your plugin. They just run

sudo gem install your_plugin__name

and the next time they run mongrel your plugin will be loaded. Very nice. The app doesn't need to be told to load the plugin.

rails code dissection

The first article on The Rails Way reviews the code of Tracks, a Rails site based on GTD.
I took note of the site when I saw it was co-run by Capistrano creator and Rails core team member Jamis Buck.

I really like the formatting and display of the code samples and the layout in general looks nice enough that I'm keen to try out Mephisto. Hopefully the layout sugar comes free with it.

The actual discussion of the code is great. I'm looking forward to future posts!

i made my first rubygem!

In an effort to make the world better for others I made my new recipe library for capistrano into a ruby gem. It took a little doing as there didn't appear to be a concise example on the rubygems site of how to construct the gemspec file. Dave Thomas's Pickaxe book covered it well though.

So here's my quick and dirty guide to creating a gem.

Make a file called projectname.gemspec

require 'rubygems'
SPEC = Gem::Specification.new do |spec|
  spec.name = 'deprec'
  spec.version = '0.1.1'
  spec.summary = 'deployment recipes for capistrano'
  spec.description = <<-EOF
      This project provides libraries of Capistrano tasks and extensions to
      remove the repetative manual work associated with installing services
      on linux servers.
  EOF
  spec.require_path = "lib"
  # spec.platform = Gem::Platform::Ruby
  # spec.required_ruby_version = '>= 1.6.8' # I don't know
  spec.add_dependency('capistrano', '>= 1.2.0')
  spec.files = Dir['lib/*.rb']
end

Then run these commands to build and install the gem

gem build deprec.gemspec
sudo gem install deprec-0.1.1.gem

I applied for a rubyforge project today and aim to publish the gem when it gets approved.

at last! ubuntu server on mac with parallels

After three attempts and several hours wasted I managed to get ubuntu 6.06 LTS server running on my Mac under Parallels. The secret is to download the PC (Intel x86) alternate install CD and select 'server' at the boot prompt. Oh, and select 'Other Linux Kernel 2.6' because Parallels doesn't explicitly support the most popular Linux distro out there at the moment.

RubyOnRails pagination fix

update: Rails Pagination is ugly and will be deprecated.

Here's a fix I made to get around a problem in Rails Pagination.

# pagination links do not support all form objects properly
# a hash with values such as date[year], date[month] and date[day]
# will be included in the pagination link as date=month11day9year2006
#
# putting this function in application_helper.rb and calling it from your
# view will properly construct the pagination links to include your form
# input
#
# <%= pagination_links(@cdr_pages, :params => marshall_objects(params)) %>
#
def marshall_objects(params)
  params.each do |key, val|
    if val.class == HashWithIndifferentAccess
      params[key] = nil
      val.each {|sub_key, sub_val| params[key + '[' + sub_key + ']'] = sub_val}
    end
  end
  params
end