February 2006

You may have noticed, and I’ve already reported about this in another article, that installing fcgi on Windows is impossible. Even running Lighttpd isn’t quite easy, especially for newcomers. So this is why I’m writing this step-by-step guide, to make your life easier (at least I hope so - if you don’t like it, send me an email or design an anti-step-by-step-guide-button). Another note: I won’t cover the topic ‘How to install Ruby on Windows’ here. There’s a good entry about that on the Ruby on Rails Wiki. You basically only have to get the Ruby one-click installer and install RubyGems, a package manager.

1. Lighttpd for Windows

Lighttpd is actually designed for Linux and Darwin so it’s a bit hard to compile it on your own, especially if you don’t have cygwin installed. Generously there’s a person like Kevin Worthington who has a on category on his blog where you can inform yourself of the latest compiled versions of Lighttpd for Windows (at the moment that’s 1.4.10a). One note: Lighttpd for Windows is sometimes still buggy so I wouldn’t recommend it for production but it’s really fine for testing and development.

Installing it should be really no problem.

2. SCGI Ruby on Rails Runner

Thus FastCGI won’t work with Lighttpd under Windows, we need an alternative: SCGI, which is at least as fast as FastCGI and a lot easier to install. You first have to download the gem package and install it with RubyGems:

[code lang="bash"]gem install scgi_rails-0.4.3.gem[/code]

3. Configuring Lighttpd

You now have to change your settings for Lighttpd. These are written down in lighttpd.conf, which should be in a folder called ‘etc’ in your Lighttpd installation folder. Make a copy of it and alter the file like that:

[code lang="bash"] server.modules = ( “modrewrite”, “modredirect”, “modaccess”, “modaccesslog”, “modstatus”, “modscgi”)

server.document-root = “” server.errorlog = “” accesslog.filename = “” static-file.exclude-extensions = ( “.scgi” ) server.error-handler-404 = “/dispatch.scgi” scgi.server = ( “dispatch.scgi” => (( “host” => “127.0.0.1″, “port” => 9999, “check-local” => “disable” )) ) scgi.debug = 3 status.status-url = “/server-status” status.config-url = “/server-config” [/code]

Note the line which says ’scgi.debug = 3′. That means that your scgi-server will log a lot of debugging-information. Change this to 0 if you want to run in deployment mode (which you shouldn’t do on Windows anyway).

4. Configuring SCGI

Open a command window, change to your ruby application directory and type: [code lang="bash"]scgictrl config[/code] It will ask you for your password. Write it down and don’t tell anybody. The command will generate a scgi.yaml file in your config directory where you can edit the mode of your scgi server (production | development) and some other stuff. scgictrl has some other nice abilities, like monitoring your application (just add ‘monitor’ after the scgi_ctrl command), which you can read about in the SCGI Ruby Runner Howtos

5. Starting the servers

Now the only thing we have to is starting our servers. That’s Lighttpd and SCGI: [code lang="bash"] lighttpd.exe -f \etc\lighttpd.conf scgi_service [/code] You have to execute this from within your rails application folder. And basically that’s it. To kill your servers use these lines: [code lang="bash"] process.exe -k lighttpd.exe > nul process.exe -k ruby.exe > nul [/code]

If you have any questions, just write me an email or post a comment (and don’t be afraid of telling me your opinion, I don’t bite, usually)

This post is in german because it’s about a local meeting which may be uninteresting for you if you’re not located in Austria

Wir laden am Samstag, 4. März zu unserem 1. Blogger-Treffen (cooler Name in Arbeit) ein. Wir sind: Gernot, Benedikt und ich.

Worum gehts?

Das Treffen soll einfach eine gemütliche Runde werden, in der wir Erfahrungen und Ideen austauschen und über Webspezifisches diskutieren können. Als kleine Anregung eine kleine (und natürlich unvollständige) Liste:

• Webstandards
• Design
• AJAX
• Best Practices
• Ausbildung
• Empfehlenswertes im Web
• …

Im Lokal gibt es kostenloses WLAN, als bringt eure Notebooks mit!

Wo & Wie?

Wir treffen uns am Samstag, 4. März um 18.00 Uhr im »Salzberg« in der Magdalenenstraße 17 im 6. Bezirk in Wien. Wir haben einen Tisch für 12 Personen reserviert, wenn du dabei sein willst, schreib mir einfach eine kurze Mail.

Anfahrt

Öffentlich:
U4 bis Station »Pilgramgasse«; zu Fuß in die Hofmühlgasse, dann rechts in die Mollardgasse. Anschließend geradeaus bis zur Magdalenenstraße (ca. 5 Minuten). Das Salzberg ist dann nicht mehr zu übersehen.

Auto:
Auf der Salzberg-Website gibt es eine kleine Übersichtskarte. Parkplätze sollten am Wochenende kein Problem sein. Zu beachten gilt die Einbahnregelung der Wienzeilen: dich rechte Wienzeile geht nur stadteinwärts, die linke nur stadtauswärts.

Ich freu mich auf eure Rückmeldungen! Bei weiteren Fragen kontaktiert mich einfach.

We will never share your email address. We hate spam too.

Currently over at indiefy.com

Traditional Web 1.0 companies used to sell your email address. To anybody. Maybe things will change?

…Because the love song is never simply happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather hate songs disguised as love songs, and they are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the whispers of sorrow, the echoes of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love, for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil – the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here – so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.

Found this on flickr today. My special topic for my english matura was about Nick Cave and his life and one of my questions was exactly about his definition of a love song - duende.

Originally uploaded by Cristina Precioso.

I’m sure you all know these moments when you say: “I will do this and that, and read this, work on that,etc.” Well, most of the times you can never achieve those things, especially not when you’re on semester break. Tomorrow, college will start again and I gonna have some fancy courses like Introduction to Operating Systems, Data Structures and Algorithms, Networks and, now really for the last time, Mathematics. I’m really looking forward to it because I think, or at least I hope, that this semester gonna be more interesting than the last one was. You know, you have to get over all that basic stuff.

And because I don’t wanna write just about myself, here’s a hopefully useful link for you: MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT now grants access to more than 1.200 of their courses, with learning materials, tests and everything you need to study on yourself. The great thing is that it’s absolutely free, you don’t have to register to access that huge collection of knowledge and so if you’re not able to study at the MIT, you can at least see what they have to offer (and benefit of it).

Can you remember that I’ve once said that I will post regularly? Well, I… I simply can’t. So here I am, for your pleasure.

Because I couldn’t find anything really important (wait, that’s wrong, everything is important, but there’s not a specific subject with a spot light pointed on it), so let me just write a few words about thing I’m currently working on or may be interesting for you.

Subversion

I finally managed it to install Subversion on my dreamhost account. Which is quite easy, actually, because they now have everything you need in their wonderful control panel (which is quite slow at the moment, though). Never mind, I had some problems with it last week and tried again today and - voila - my tiny, little Rails project is now powered by Subversion, which is really a wonderful thing to use. Easy to begin with and I will never ever again bother about lost sourcecode.

Del.icio.us

Found some nice websites about lofts today on del.icio.us. One day when I’m grown up (haha), I wanna live in one. Please don’t start writing comments like: ‘Yes, it’s really great writing comments on a weblog, while sitting in my enormous living room, looking out of the window’. But it’s okay if you’ll send me some photos of your dream-loft.

Another thing about del.icio.us: I found another way to integrate my latest links (dreamhost doesn’t banned php’s furlopen and I was too lazy to rewrite the plugin for curl). It’s a javascript solution but at least it’s from del.icio.us itself.

Various stuff

Do you know How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie? No? Thank go to your next bookstore (if you are too lazy to stand up, Amazon is fine too) and order it. If only 50% of the techniques he describes in his book actually work, it’s fabulous and you will make your first million dollars even before you are 24 (hey, there’s still hope for me ;-) ).

So, I’ve told you about Subversion, about my weakness regarding lofts, the best psycho-book I’ve read so far and… Nothing left! Well, see you soon!

Originally uploaded by James Wheare.

Just an awesome shot.

You may not be a fan of David Heinemeier Hansson’s Ruby on Rails but one thing you definitely can’t deny is that he is one of they guys with the best presentation techniques. Have you ever seen his Pursuit of Beauty slides? No? So lay back and relax (but don’t forget to breath, that would complicate the whole thing).

I’ve seen quite a few presentations at college by some people who, at least it looked like they would, earn plenty of money. Some of those presentations were quite interesting and well done, some were, gently speaking, just useless. Overloaded, ininformative and plainly ugly. But they all had one thing in common: they were old style, discreet colors with no sense of humor.

David has a really different style which, at least in my eyes, is much more informative and it is really good looking. So what’s his key? Well, I can’t say what his key really is because then I would call me Mr Heinemeier Hansson himself, but I can at least give you some points which seem to be very important.

Colors

Colors are really important in my opinion. Most of the presentations I’ve seen were just plain white or grey and looked quite boring. David uses plain black for his code-samples (TextMate style syntax highlighting), white for screenshot slides and those really fantastic fancy colors between red and blue for his key-slides.

Key Sentences

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

David seems to have a real writer’s talent. In each of his presentations you can find some key senctences, those who make clear what he wants to express in just a few words. As I said earlier, I’ve seen slides from people who were not capable of saying what they want within a dozen slides.

I can understand that you can’t use David’s colorful and really interesting style for every presentation (imagine some 50 year old banking bosses, looking at one of those slides if you are begging for some capital for your startup) but especially for young and creative people, it’s absolutely a way to go.

That’s finally a cool interface system: Multi-Touch Interaction. You all know The Minority Report? Yeah, I also hate Tom Cruise for making Katie Holmes pregnant, but that’s life. Anyway, you can remember that fantastic computer on which Chief John Anderton is working? Without any keyboard or mouse controls? And that’s pretty much the technique of Jeff Han, it’s a

Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user interactions on a graphical interaction surface.

You really have to take a look at his other projects, one thing I find cool is MoCap Sensor Fusion, a motion capture system which also records physiometric data. Forget all the thoughts about the new Apple MacBook Pro, I want to have that thing!

Found at misto’s blog

If you’re one of those unlucky rails on windows users like me who ever wanted to use fcgi instead of cgi, then there’s help for you out there. No, no new fcgi binaries for windows but something even better: scgi, which is quite similar to fcgi and cgi and heavily used by Phyton programmers and services.

And it’s a breeze installing it under windows in combination with lighttpd: How To Deploy With Lighttpd On Windows, great Wiki article.