A while back I did a little experiment with building a ruby gem – the result was Regexhelper. You can check out the gem on Rubygems.org, or check out the source at Githu.com. Of course, you can install by by running ‘gem install regexhelper’ if you’re so inclined. As of now its been downloaded 45 times.

I used a the jeweler gem to help create regexhelper. Right now the gem is pretty empty, and probably very amateurish, but I plan on updating and cleaning it up as soon as possible.

vi .bashrc

is for current user only.

sudo vi /etc/bash.bashrc

is for all users – hence the sudo.

in .bashrc, add:

export PS1=”\e[0;34m[\u@\h \W]\$ \e[m”

to permanently change the bash prompt color.

List of Color codes:

• Black 0;30
• Blue 0;34
• Green 0;32
• Cyan 0;36
• Red 0;31
• Purple 0;35
• Brown 0;33
• Blue 0;34
• Green 0;32
• Cyan 0;36
• Red 0;31
• Purple 0;35
• Brown 0;33

Replace digit 0 with 1 to get light color version.

Just for the sake of remembering:
After installing MySQL via Macports (which installs mySQL to a different place than you’d expect), install the MySQL gem with:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install mysql — –with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

I finally remembered after I found my bookmark for Mark Turner (amerine.net)’s post on installing Rails 3/Ruby 1.9.2.

While learning Rails, I’ve come across a fair number of really interesting subsets/addons to Rails. This is a list of the ones I plan to investigate in greater detail:

• Sinatra – Super simple and quick rails app setup – it doesn’t get much easier than this:
  

  require ‘sinatra’

  get ‘/’ do
  “Hello World!”
  end

  I love the way Sinatra does routing, and the erb :erbname syntax just makes sense right off the bat. Also is supposed to work well with heroku, though I haven’t goten that far yet.

• Refinery – Also super-quick and easy Gem, but builds out a bare-bones but extensible CMS/blogging engine. COWPU and Bend.rb are using it during the weekly hack night in Bend to build hot sexy pizza websites.

Coffeescript – Coffeescript is a kind of Ruby-ish language that compiles into javascript, and as of Rails 3.1 will come bundled with rails. I like coffeescript because I’m a dork who can’t type and I always mess up javascript, which is then just a PITA to debug.

Heroku is pretty cool: a free host for your rails apps that also works really well with git/github. Since my current hosting has some pretty odd hosting for rails, I’ll be using heroku to host my demo apps. While adding a demo app, I received this error:

heroku keys:add …/custom_require.rb:36:in `require’: no such file to load — readline (LoadError)

According to dirk.net, this error is due to missing libraries after installing ruby from source.

The provided fix worked just fine for me:

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev
sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev

After that, I cd to where I unpacked the Ruby source and ran:

ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install

heroku keys:add worked fine from there. Thanks to dirk.net for the fix.