November 11, 2005

Still alive?

I am still alive, honest.

The first part of the week was spent dying a horrible and painful death from a terrifying life-threatening infectious disease (I had a bit of a cold and didn't feel too great).

Then I lost a day and a night to the joys of Ruby on Rails on Debian. Ready for prime time? Not without a LOT of pain. This is one framework that needs to grow up before I'd recommend it for general use; you need to be a genius sysadmin and no more than one step removed from divinity to have any hope of getting it to behave on a production server. More on that later, just as soon as I can write about it without letting out blood-curdling howls of anger and pain.

And then yesterday, wow. Google Open House, then Soup launch. Two London office opening parties in one night. More on Google Open House later, just as soon as I can turn my incoherent notes into something resembling an informed opinion.

Tomorrow, back to London with my nephew, taking him there for a day out, to do a bit of christmas shopping, but mostly to have an excuse to spend a few hours in Hamleys.

Meanwhile: sleep.

Posted by savs at November 11, 2005 11:16 PM
Comments

Come on, it's not that hard! I was able to set up my journal pretty easily, and it runs on the rails-based 'typo' system:

http://journal.dedasys.com/

Here are the instructions I used:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntuDebianTestingAndUnstable

Posted by: David Welton at November 12, 2005 10:23 AM

Yes, it is. There are no workable packages in Debian stable (Debian stable's Ruby packages are apparently a bit peculiar and miss out bits that are available by default in other Ruby distributions). And Rails is a rapidly moving target as it creeps toward the 1.0 release, which effectively means you need to track SVN to get the most usable code.

This is not necessarily Rails' fault ... incredible adoption of a new framework so early in the life cycle is a sign that it is very clearly addressing a need and is doing so effectively. But please don't tell me this is a good time to adopt it in the enterprise. How about giving it a few more weeks or months to get 1.0 out the door and some proper packaging sorted out?

Posted by: Andrew Savory at November 12, 2005 11:46 PM