Now I have finally found something, that makes Ruby on Rails on Windows really usable for the first time! It’s the RailsInstaller Project from EngineYard (railsinstaller.org).

It has treated me very good so far, just one minor problem: It assumes, that you have a clip.exe on your system, which seems to be deployed with all Server versions since 2003 and Windows 7 appearantly. Since I’m still on XP, I had to download it manually (see this tip here, or download it directly from Microsoft) and put it in my c:\windows\system32 folder. Now it’s working like magic.

I’m very excited to see, how this goes on for me and what functionality I can actually use on windows – which usually lacks the c-bindings a lot of gems still have.

Update #1: It turns out that you can even install native extensions. The RailsInstaller includes a package called the “Development Kit” (here on github) which includes the necessary headers, libs etc for compiling the extension on windows. Brilliant!

Unfortunately, I found myself forced to roll back my server a couple of times, because my mailserver qmail had stopped working without any error-message in the logs. Even more unfortunate is the person trying to resolve the problems with it – in this case: me. The only error-message you get is: “#421 unable to read controls”. All my hour-long attempts to change this, had no ultimate success. I rewrote config, changed permissions, restarted the service, backed up my mail and so on. All this, while knowing that no mail can be received by my server hosting about 15 Domains total.

When I found out, that Plesk could also work with postfix, I was thrilled! I envisioned switching servers down the road and the new server would run Postfix. What I didn’t know was how easy switching is using plesk. This is really the killer-feature to me right now! You just gotta love the simplicity. It preserves the email on the server and just switches the MTA to Postfix. Just perfect! So here you go:

Simply run:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/autoinstaller –select-release-current –install-component postfix

Wait a few minutes… and that’s it!!!

For me, it saved my day! After hours trying to figure out how to fix qmail for the 100th time, the fix took a few minutes. Now the server is soaring and finnaly giving me good log-messages. Thank you, postfix. Thank you Plesk-develpers!

1. keyboard layout
• install these packages: console-data unicode-data language-pack-de-base
• replace “de” with the locale you need (de is for german locale)
• (if it has not already run automatically) run: dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
2. language-settings in the console
• (you might also need to install language-pack-de-base)
• run: dpkg-reconfigure locales
• edit /etc/default/locale
• put in LANG=”de_DE.UTF-8″ instead of the default entry
• to really see, if it worked all the way, you have to reboot. But just starting the shell again by running “bash” should also do the trick for a while.

Well, that’s already it. Sometimes it not about the quantity, but the quality.

I was looking for a booking system to use for this. And just as I was about to make the decision to write one myself, I found this service called supersaas. They offer a good service – unfortunately, it will set me back a few euros, but it’s better than doing it myself.

So, I can recommend supersaas. Check it out, if you need something similiar.

It let’s you install multiple (what feels to be an infinate number of) versions of ruby to work with. Also it allows you to strictly seperate the gems of each version.
Why is this important? Well let’s assume, you have 2 projects. One of which is a rather old project, that you started a few years ago and that is running fine as is, which might be ruby 1.8.7 and rails 2.3.
And on the other hand you have a brand new project you are just starting out on. Of course you want to use the latest and greatest, which as of right now might be ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3.1-pre. To combine those two on one machine was virtually impossible before. But now there’s RVM and gives you the possibility to run them along-side of each other.

However, there are some pitfalls when switching to RVM as partly described at https://rvm.beginrescueend.com.

The first thing I discovered was the lack of irb. Irb is the command-line interface used by ruby. Also the rails-console requires irb and readline (mostly for tab-completion I assume). It’s as easy as this:

no realine = no rails console!

So you have to install readline somehow. Unfortunately, you have to uninstall your ruby version and reinstall it after installing readline.

To install readline run:

# note: rvm package is now "rvm pkg"
rvm package install readline
rvm remove 1.9.2
rvm install 1.9.2 --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr

There is quite a few more features, that one might want when using ruby. So this is the string I used to install my version of 1.9.2 for future reference:

rvm install 1.9.2 --with-iconv-dir=$rvm_path/usr --with-readline-dir=$rvm_path/usr --with-zlib-dir=$rvm_path/usr --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr --with-curl-dir=$rvm_path/usr

This should do the trick – at least it looks good so far.

A quick update: I’ve had more problems with RVM. This time, the installation of curl, that rvm compiles did not have SSL-support. To (re-)compile it yourself with ssl, run (in ~/.rvm/src/curl.X.X):

./configure –with-ssl
make
make install

This solved a few of my problem – unfortunately not all.

I wanted to edit a SASS-file (-> http://sass-lang.com) for a rails project. The source-file is required to have space-indenting with 2 spaces for every indentation. I caught myself using the tab key to indent everything, but then the parser simply gave me error-messages.

So I had to find a way to make vim interpret the tab key as 2 spaces – easier said then done.
A more sophisticated list of commands for vim can be found here.

The commands I used to get the results I needed were:

set expandtab
set softtabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2

A note at the end: This only works for vim – not for vi!

So if you’re using vim – have fun or at least more success with this!

SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. (code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)

At first, I thought there was something wrong with my mailserver. So I reinstalled the certificates and everything. No change.
So, as always: Google to the rescue! I found a few descriptions of that error, but none of the tipps for resolving did the trick for me.

Shortly before I was ready to give up on the secure connection (which I hate to do!), I found a tip that helped me.

I turns out, that Thunderbird gives you that error, when your user-credentials are wrong!
So changing my username in the settings to the correct one did the trick. Hope this helps someone out some time.

Image you have this new site you’re running: domain.com. You’re very exited to put it online and finally your customer gives his go! Lots of new and overhauled content to be put on the web with little more than a snap of your finger. So you use your mighty finger and boom, there it is: online and for everyone to see. In order to make it for everyone to find, there’s a bit more magic involved unfortunately. The magic is called search engine optimization (short SEO) and I’m not going to discuss this here in detail. But one simple rule is, that you should decide on and point out one main domain. In your case, this should be www.domain.com. To make Google and the other search engines only index the main site, you have to redirect all the requests for domain.com to www.domain.com. So far, so good, but that goes for all requests like domain.com/category1/page2.html.

To achieve this, there is a simple way in the Apache 2 Webserver, which is called the Rewrite Engine. To configure it, you have to either edit the Apache-config files (normally unter /etc/apache2/sites-available) or the .htaccess file in the root-directory of your Website. (One post earlier I discussed the custom apache-config in vhost.conf files for Plesk. You can put it there too.)

Here’s what to put there:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

In my setup, I had to change the last line to (notice the missing slash before $1):

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com$1 [R=permanent,L]

This was to avoid an occuring double-slash after the domain name as in www.domain.com//page.html. I guess you’ll have to try that out yourself for your server and website.

Anyway, thanks to the guys at nixCraft, where I found the solution.