Installing sqlite-ruby (2.2.3) with native extensions
Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/home/mike/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for main() in -lsqlite… no
checking for sqlite.h… no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.

After a you see this sort of thing a few times you pretty instinctively bang out the command:

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

I was pretty takenaback to get the same error after installing the dev libraries. It turns out that I was installing the gem “sqlite-ruby” when I needed “sqlite3” is what you need if you are using Ruby 1.9.2.

mike@sleepycat:~/CrayonPhysicsDeluxe$./launcher
./launcher: error while loading shared libraries: libmikmod.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It turns out that libmikmod and another library need to be installed to get this game up and running…

sudo apt-get install libmikmod2 libsmpeg0

You will also need to make the file “crayon” in the CrayonPhysicsDeluxe folder executable as well:

mike@sleepycat:~/CrayonPhysicsDeluxe$ chmod +x crayon

I can’t remember if I had to chmod the launcher file as well, but if you run “ls” on ~/CrayonPhysicsDeluxe launcher and crayon should both be green.

Happy drawing!

@blog.user.try(:username)

Interested, I looked it up. As far as I can tell, it seems that one of the clever folks behind Github posted it as a helpful snippet on his blog.
From there it seems to have made its way into the Rails ActiveSupport library and then into Ruby 1.9 itself. Basically its the same as send except it swallows errors and just returns nil.
An example from the docs:

@person ? @person.name : nil

could be replaced with:

@person.try(:name)

Coolness! I know this will be making its way into my own code shortly. Check out Scott Harvey’s excellent explanation of the try method and also take a look at the documentation here.

Microsoft’s response was well known: It used its monopoly in the operating systems world to push Internet Explorer into a position of market dominance. But there is another strategy that went with this that I feel is under-appreciated for its brilliance and seemingly unacknowledged in the recent kerfuffle about whether or not IE is a modern browser; Internet Explorer was never really intended to be a browser, let alone a modern one. It’s a Trojan horse.

That may seem like a strange thing to say, the term is largely used for computer viruses now, but I mean it in the original sense of the term; “a subversive person or device placed within the ranks of the enemy”. In this case the city being sacked and burned is not Troy, it is the promised land of desktop quality applications running in the browser.

In the same way that all word processors offer the ability to bold or underline text, Browsers are supposed to offer the authors of web pages a reasonably standard set of tools. There must be some way of announcing that a certain section of text is bold, or located at a certain place on the page. Any browser reading that web page should respect that announcement and act accordingly. More often than not IE does something else.

Since its earliest days IE has  consistently behaved differently, forcing page authors to adopt whatever syntax IE requires in order to reach the 90%+ of the people on the internet.

While there are plenty of formatting “quirks” to complain about, the real differences come when web page authors try to attach behaviour to their pages using Javascript; the language that Netscape created to bring about their vision of desktop quality applications in the browser.

Because of the differences IE introduced, it’s common to see authors checking to see if it is IE that is running their code and running the commands specific to that version. Its even common to see people creating a loading totally separate scripts based on which version of IE is being used to view the site. This has been necessary because not only is the syntax to preform a certain action going to be different between IE and every other browser, but it is also changes between versions of IE.

Its clear to me that Microsoft’s unrelenting consistency in introducing incompatibilities into Javascript (and all the standards the web runs on) via IE is actually a business strategy to stave off web applications from competing with the desktop.  I can hear the truth of this in the chorus of groans or ripples of laughter at every mention of IE among a group of web developers (pretty much any video from a jQuery conference will have this).

While Mozilla’s Paul Rouget is pointing out that in spite of the “Same markup” and  non-sensical “Native HTML5″ sloganeering, even the newest version of IE lacks support for many of the parts of the HTML5 standard. Given that HTML5 is very much aimed at enabling web apps to look and feel like desktop apps, I would expect nothing else. This line of reasoning also suggests that  Mozilla or Chrome isn’t the biggest threat to Microsoft; jQuery is.

If that’s true you may ask, why then would Microsoft be contributing code to jQuery? Well I would say that this strategy has been so successful that it is now starting to hurt Microsoft. Many developers took Microsoft’s browser features at face value and used them… extensively. Now the world (especially the lucrative corporate world) is filled with web applications that can only run on a specific version of IE (often IE6) and Microsoft is stuck supporting them. Its a big enough problem that it prompted Google to create Chrome Frame so those stuck with IE6 could still use (Google’s) modern websites) When you have Microsoft themselves pleading with users to stop using IE6, Their support of, and contributions to, jQuery are likely because they see it as a method of moving people between versions of IE.

So while its easy to knock Internet Explorer, especially when I am trying to figure out how to get my pages working in IE, I try to remember to acknowledge it for what it is; a brilliant piece of business strategy.

LoadError (no such file to load — sqlite3):

But it was already commented out of my Gemfile. It took some thinking before I realized that ActiveRecord is probably looking for that by default regardless of whether or not I am including it in my Gemfile. So the solution was to remove ActiveRecord. That used to be reasonably obvious in Rails 2.3 but Rails 3 made it a little less so. A standard config.application.rb file starts with the lines:

require File.expand_path(‘../boot’, __FILE__)

require ‘rails/all’

Rails 3 is broken up into a bunch of different parts and that require ‘rails/all’ pulls in, well all of them including ActiveRecord. An equivalent statement would be:

require “active_record/railtie”
require “action_controller/railtie”
require “action_mailer/railtie”
require “active_resource/railtie”
require “rails/test_unit/railtie”

Of course once you have exchanged ‘rails/all’ for that, you can simply comment out ActiveRecord and that’s that. If you are starting a new Rails app you can have Rails do that for you by using the flags -O or –skip-activerecord.

Now that AR is gone, my app starts without looking for a database and all is goodness and light.

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[prague]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [x86_64-linux]
[prague]$ rails -v
Rails 3.0.3
[prague]$ gem -v
1.3.6
[prague]$ bundle -v
Bundler version 1.0.7
[prague]$ date
Sun Mar 20 19:04:34 PDT 2011

Turning to the great minds at Stackoverflow, I was advised to use environmental variables.
Since my application is connecting to another site via SFTP I have a hash of all the usual stuff; username password and hostname. It turns out you can just reference environmental variables like this:

@sftp_credentials = {Rails.env.to_sym => {
:sftp_host => ENV['SFTP_HOST'],
:sftp_user => ENV['SFTP_USER'],
:sftp_password => ENV['SFTP_PASSWORD']
}}

And then make sure you have the environment vars set in your .bashrc so they are available during local development:

export SFTP_HOST=’somesite.com’
export SFTP_USER=’someuser’
export SFTP_PASSWORD=’somepassword’

And then set those variables on Heroku so they are available when your app runs there:

mike@sleepycat:~/projects/myapp$ heroku config:add SFTP_HOST=somesite.com SFTP_USER=someuser SFTP_PASSWORD=somepassword
Adding config vars:
SFTP_HOST => somesite.com
SFTP_PASSWORD => somepassword
SFTP_USER => someuser
Restarting app…done.

mike@sleepycat:~/projects/my_app$ git branch –track haml_val origin/haml_val
fatal: Not a valid object name: ‘origin/haml_val’.

A fatality huh? I checked my syntax and it really was fine. Curious I checked my remotes:

mike@sleepycat:~/projects/myapp$ git remote show origin
…
haml_val new (next fetch will store in remotes/origin)
…

From that I decide that a quick git pull (which I believe runs git fetch and then get merge) should do the trick but I get the same error. After some head scratching it turns out that the solution really is fetch:

mike@sleepycat:~/projects/myapp$ git fetch origin
From github.com:sleepycat/myapp
* [new branch] haml_val -> origin/haml_val
bf4ba85..83f687f master -> origin/master
mike@sleepycat:~/projects/myapp$ git branch –track haml_val origin/haml_val
Branch haml_val set up to track remote branch haml_val from origin.

Success! I still don’t know why that would work and git pull wouldn’t but either way its a lesson learned.

Its simple enough that it really doesn’t warrant any explanation. Simply point it to the cue file and click convert. It works on flac, ape and several other files. It seems the most recent version is to be found here. If it complains about needing “oggenc” when you try to use it just run “sudo apt-get install vorbis-tools” and it will install the ogg encoder gCue2Tracks is looking for.