Thin 1.0 is out

Marc André Cournoyer announced the release of Thin 1.0 on his blog last week.

Tracks

Tracks is a GPL Rails application to help implement David Allen's "Getting Things Done".

I've installed it on my MBP and it looks great so far. You can tag tasks (and view only tasks for one tag), set up contexts such as work/home/misc and then view things grouped by context, set due dates, set tasks to only be visible after a certain date, view graphs and statistics about how long it takes you to complete tasks, comes with an API so you can write your own scripts to interact with it - it's very comprehensive.

rspec_on_rails sqlite3 error

I started a new project last night, and decided to use rspec_on_rails. I was following some examples from Luke Redpath's blog entry and got the following error:


SQLite3::SQLException in 'A player should be invalid without a user_id'
SQL logic error or missing database


I eventually tracked down an email from David Chelimsky on rspec-users that explained this could be fixed by setting config.use_transactional_fixtures = false in
spec/spec_helper.rb.

Anyway, posting it here to make it easier to google for.

Ruby on Rails & MySQL on Tiger

First, see the previous blog entry to fix your Ruby install to be able to make proper binary extensions. You're going to need to build a mysql extension for Ruby later.

If you haven't already done so, install XCode (it's on the Tiger DVD), and fink. If you've only just installed fink, make sure you do a

fink selfupdate
fink update-all

Those will take a considerable amount of time if you haven't run them before.

Now you need to install MySQL. You can either do it from the bare tarball, or use a package manager like fink or darwinports. I like fink, so do:

fink install mysql mysql-client

and let fink grind away at all the assorted dependencies mysql needs. This will take a while, MySQL is big.

Now that MySQL is installed, we can install rails -

sudo gem install rails

Rails doesn't ship with an adapter for MySQL. We install it like so (this should be one line)

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-lib=/sw/lib/mysql --with-mysql-include=/sw/include

so that it can find the mysql libraries fink installed earlier. Note that the -- --with-mysql-include is supposed to be there, that isn't a typo.

You can now go find one of the Rails tutorials like the one Vincent Foley has at http://darkhost.mine.nu:81/~vince/rails/tutorial.html and get started with Rails.