samuelschroeder.com
Ruby in the front, Rails in the back.

This past weekend I bought a new MacBook and, of course, it has Leopard for the OS. As I was installing all of the development tools I need I kept having issues when trying to run MySQL 5.0.51. I installed from the Mac OS X packages.

After consulting google I came across Ted Hogan’s site. He explained that is was a permissions issue between “/usr/local/mysql/data” and the current logged in user. His fix is listed below.

You can get to this through the finder by using the “Go to Folder” dropdown item from the Finder’s “Go” menu. Just type in /usr/local and go from there. Also, you can modify the permissions by command-I (info dialog) at the bottom (Sharing & Permissions.) Be sure to click the options button (gear box at bottom) and select “Apply to enclosed items” as well.

Yesterday I found that my team was selected for the Sierra Bravo F1 Overnight Website Challenge. I’m pretty excited about it. The teams get to stay up all night coding like fiends while powered by free Red Bull, Peace Coffee, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Chipotle with an occasional break for a Guitar Hero contest. My team is one representing the Ruby Users of Minnesota (RUM) and we have some top quality developers. I hope I measure up.

One part nerd Olympics, one part community service project and one part race-against-the-clock — Sierra Bravo’s F1 Overnight Website Challenge presented by VISI will partner deserving Minnesota non-profits with teams of talented web developers for 24 hours of fun collaboration culminating in a fully operational website for each participating non-profit. - Sierra Bravo website

Here is the link to team Ruby.mn. I’m the one with the party hat.

I know this has been documented in other places so this is mostly for my own sanity. I want to use the attachment_fu plug-in by Rick Olson for my rails app to upload user avatars. I also want to resize the images and create a series of smaller thumbnails for use throughout the site.

Steps to install ImageMagick

1. Download the Windows binary of ImageMagick. I used ImageMagick-6.3.5-4-Q16-windows-dll.exe
2. Run the ImageMagick installer (The file you just downloaded) and accept the defaults.
3. Open a command prompt to verify the install was successful
4. Type >convert logo: logo.miff
5. Type >imdisplay logo.miff
6. If all went well with the install a little picture of blue wizard should appear.

Steps to install MiniMagick

1. Install the gem from the command prompt with the command gem install mini_magick. You may be asked to install a few required dependencies. Say yes.
2. Wait for the download and install to complete.

You should be good now to install attachment_fu, but that is beyond the scope of this article. Use the links below for more information

References:

• Mike Clark’s Tutorial
• Khamsouk Souvanlasy’s Ajax and attachment_fu
• Helpful hints with attachment_fu and Windows

I recently installed a new hard drive on my development PC and thought it would be a good time to refresh my environment since it was suffering from Windows rot. Man, was that experience an eye opener as to the tools I use. Here is my alphabetized list.

• Adobe Writer
• Aptana IDE w/ Rails plug-in (Formerly RadRails)
• Beyond Compare
• Crystal Reports XI
• DevTrack
• Firefox
• Microsoft IIS
• MSDN Books Online
• MySQL Database and GUI Tools
• OpenEdge Studio and Architect
• Rails
• Ruby
• SQL Server & Service Pack
• Stimulsoft Reports
• TextPad
• TortoiseSVN
• Visual Source Safe
• Visual Studio 2005 Standard & Service Pack

I had to install more things like mail clients, printers, etc. as well. I just found it amazing at the number of tools I have to use in my professional life