The latest VMware Server version is 2.0.2, released on October 27 of this year, so I thought I would give it a spin. The downloads are available as RPMs, so that was the obvious choice for my Fedora Core 8 server. FC8 is pretty rusty now, but that means the kernel is stable, which also means that the VMware Server integration (i.e. the local compiles) work without any complaints. Nice. The 2.0.2 version is a maintenance release, but I was hoping it would fix my VMware Infrastructure Web Access startup problem. After a reboot, all the VMware daemons are running, but the first time I try and connect (via the… Read More
Continue ReadingA New Look for the Web Site
My mostly static web site was hacked together about 5 years ago with straight HTML tags using the XEmacs editor. To say the least, it was starting to look pretty frayed around the edges, not to mention boring. My ISP doesn’t support Rails sites well – they are a shared hosting ISP, with the main mission to be as inexpensive as possible, and they do that very well. Works for me. So, I started looking around for something that could generate and maintain a static web site. I found this article on Andy Atkinson’s blog; a nice overview of 5 Ruby-based generators. Sweet! Andy wasn’t real impressed with webgen, but… Read More
Continue ReadingRewind Ruby 1.9.1 (or “Put The Candle Back”)
I updated all the gems for my current Rails development project that is using Ruby 1.9.1. This also included an upgrade to Phusion Passenger 2.2.5. Then I upgraded to Ruby 1.9.1-p243, which promptly crashed Passenger when I did a session request through Authlogic 2.1.2. Ouch. So, I reinstalled Ruby 1.9.1-p129, and all is well again. Oddly enough, there is no uninstall switch in the Ruby-for-Linux tar ball Makefile. The default install location is /usr/local, so I can keep the Fedora 8 version of Ruby 1.8.6 (via the RPM package system) intact, but I wasn’t sure what would happen if I simply re-installed the older Ruby 1.9.1 version under /usr/local. As… Read More
Continue ReadingSendmail Tweak
Although the Rails ActionMailer class is easy to test, I wanted to really use it in development mode to check all my settings in the config/email.yml file. The Fedora code base pretty much sets up sendmail out of the box, but with ISP’s possibly blocking port 25, and router configs, etc. etc, things can get confusing. The basic test from the Linux command line: put the mail in the mqueue directory, but it was going nowhere. Then I remembered the /etc/mail directory, specifically the access file: Since I set my router to act as a DHCP server, I had to add the IP assignment for the Fedora box: and then… Read More
Continue ReadingCompass, SASS, HAML
I’m working on a project that is using the latest Rails markup buzz, namely Compass, SASS and HAML, so it’s time to begin the learning process. Part of that effort will be to convert my personal Rails project over to Compass et. al. I found that the best approach seems to be to install all the required gems manually before doing anything else. That is: Installing HAML also installs SASS, which is pretty convenient. Then install the basic compass gem. Compass supports a few standard stylesheet frameworks: 960gs, blueprint and YUI. I’m using 960. For Rails integration, you can either build a new Rails project, or you can choose to… Read More
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