What I’ve really enjoyed about this project was the ability to step outside the technology realm and dive into the customer realm. Tim and I both stumbled up Steven Blank book The Four Steps to the Epiphany at the same time. I am not sure how Steven Blank stayed under my radar for so long. I’ve always considered myself a champion for the customer, but it wasn’t until I started reading the book and articles by Steven Blank that I realized that I really wasn’t, since I never got outside of the building to talk with the customer.

If you haven’t read Steve Blank, I highly recommend it. It will definitely make you think in different ways, when building an application or starting a startup.

If the key starts with “.”, then the key is scoped to the partial. For example, if translate(”.title”) is called from the registrations/new page, then the key gets scoped to ‘registrations.new.title’. I wanted the same sort of behavior with the ActionController::Translation#translate, so I created my own method called scope_key_by_controller_and_action and placed it in the ApplicationController. The code looks like:

  def scope_key_by_controller_and_action( key )
      return key unless key.first == "."
      "#{controller_name}.#{action_name}#{key}"
  end

Then I could use it with the ActionController::Translation#translate method, like so:

   def page_title
     @page_title ||=
           t( scope_key_by_controller_and_action(".title") )
   end

The scope_key_by_controller_and_action(”.title”) will be converted to “registrations.new.title” for a controller/action combo of “registrations” and “new”. If the key doesn’t start with “.” then the original key is returned.

On my mac, I just opened /etc/profile and added the following line to the bottom of file:


export PATH="/Users/graemenelson/.multiruby/install/1.8.7-p174/bin:$PATH"


My initial attempt was to add /Users/graemenelson/.multiruby/install/1.8.7-p174/bin to the top of the /etc/paths file, but other directories still appeared before my .multiruby directory.

However, this still doesn’t work when I want to switch to using a different ruby version. Does any have any ideas on how to solve this?

However, when I typed:

multiruby_setup the_usual

I kept receiving the following error, in my ~/.multiruby/build/ruby-1.8.6-p383/log.build (your directory may vary depending on the patch level for ruby 1.8.6):

readline.c: In function ‘filename_completion_proc_call’

This post pointed me in the right direction, it seems that my installation of readline in /usr/local was causing a conflict. I had just installed that the other day, when I decided to abandoned macports and go /usr/local. I just removed this installation, by going to the source directory (which I still had around) and typing sudo make uninstall. I am not sure if this messed up any of my other libraries, only time will tell.

Why I used MacPorts?

• It’s easy, just type sudo port install packagename

However, I kept running into more and more situations where MacPorts didn’t really work for me.

• MacPorts seemed to always be behind in revisions. I wanted to use the lastest and greatest.
• MacPorts sometimes failed, and I had to search around for the solution providing special switches. How is this any different than installing from source?

Lately, I started seeing conflicts between /opt/local (MacPorts) and /usr/local. This is when I decided I needed to make a choice between them. I decided to adopted the /usr/local method, since I want to be able to use the latest versions for libraries and software. When I was looking around for posts on the subject, I happened to stumble upon this nice post on why you would want to install your own packages in /usr/local. Justification!

So, today I am starting on that path. I am not sure if it will be successful, but I am giving it a try.

sudo port upgrade couchdb

Next thing I knew, Erlang was upgraded to a version that was no longer compatible with CouchDB. So, I tried several different ways to get my old Erlang version back, but with little success. I then decided to try and install all the required packages by hand. I tried a couple of different blog posts, but the one that work for me was:

http://devoh.com/posts/2009/03/couchdb-leopard

So, why change? Well, I wanted to make an update to my blog last week, but I updated my local Sinatra environment to the latest and greatest, and that broke my blog code. I didn’t have the time to spend on fixing the issues. I decided that I needed to move my blog to a mature blog platform, so I can focus on writing blog posts and working on code I really wanted to be working on.

This blog is now running on wordpress.