March 2009 Archives

Comment Away

After over a year of promising it, I finally sat down last night to enable comments on this "blog" of mine. Turns out, the process was actually pretty easy and painless, and there was really no reason I shouldn't have done it earlier (except for the fact that I doubt anyone will actually care about commenting on this thing).

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Posted by Phil Burrows on Mar 31, 2009

Go Buy Macheist 3

The Macheist 3 bundle is now available. 12 Mac apps (a combined value of over $550) for only $39! How can you pass that up? Plus, 25% of every sale goes to charity. So go ahead, purchase the bundle, there are some great apps in there.

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Posted by Phil Burrows on Mar 25, 2009

It's time...for a redesign

I’ve had this ugly, default theme for far too long; unfortunately, laziness has gotten the better of me over the past year when it came to redesigning this blog. But, this past weekend, I decided to bite the bullet and do what I’ve been avoiding for a while. So, I’ve redesigned (to be more accurate, I’ve really just “un-designed”) my blog.

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Posted by Phil Burrows on Mar 23, 2009

CSS Variables With Rack Middleware

I know I'm not the only one that has, for years, longed for variables in CSS. It's been a much discussed and debated topic; in fact, someone has even gone to the trouble to write up a proposed spec. There have been plenty of solutions, but, as a Rails developer, Rack Middleware seemed like the perfect place to hack together a quick solution for CSS variables.

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Posted by Phil Burrows on Mar 18, 2009

Passenger 2.0.6 is not compatible with Rails 2.3.1

Ryan Schwartz thinks I should actually use this blog of mine once in a while. Well, that makes one of us ;)

However, consider this a public service announcement for all those people who might have run into the problem I did with Rails and Passenger (modrails) compatibility.

An introduction before we begin: 99% of the time I use mongrel in development, because that’s what I use in production and that’s what has become my habit. However, for a new project I’m working on, we’ve discussed trying Passenger in production. So, more recently, I’ve been using passenger some in development for that project (I still, out of habit spin up script/server when starting work in the project).

As of a few days ago, this new project was running Rails 2.2.2 with Passenger 2.0.6 (when I remembered to got to http://go.local instead of http://localhost:3000). However, always wanting the apps I’m developing to stay up to date with the current version of Rails, I upgraded one to the latest, greatest Rails 2.3.1RC. A few Rails compatibility / deprecation issues, but everything was still working just fine—or so i thought. I didn’t notice anything strange because I was still developing with mongrel; I would still spin up script/server and hit http://localhost:3000. Late last night though, I remembered to use my passenger virtual host, and the following error pops up:

Ruby on Rails framework version 2.3.1 seems to be corrupted?! Please reinstall it?! Wha??

Anyway, it was a little frustrating as I tried a number of things to fix it, but the ultimate solution was simple: upgrade to Passenger 2.1.1, and voilá! Everything’s fixed.

The end.

Posted by Phil Burrows on Mar 12, 2009