This is far from an exciting application — but hey, what else are blogs for? And I certainly learned something from the project. As for Rails 3 and Heroku (or better yet, their combination), I highly recommend them for quickly getting a prototype off the ground.

1. Identify problem
2. On the grounds of theoretical purity, construct needlessly complicated solution.
3. Implement solution.

For instance, a few days ago I wanted to put together a small rails application. There was nothing earth shattering in this; I simply wanted to get a quick prototype up and running. So I update my gems, do a quick `rails prototype/` command, and boot up the empty app. It fails.

Ok, so I do the natural thing; I google the error message or whatnot; I search for a few minutes. Well, it has something to do with Snow Leopard, that much becomes clear. This begs the question: does any bug ever not have something to do with Snow Leopard? But I won’t adress that here. Anyhow, there is an obscure solution, under which I’d have to edit manually my rails installation — something like that, anyway.  But I’m not going to do that. I try some earlier versions of rails and it’s dependancies — they fail for some other reasons.

I’m sure that I could have figured it out, had I dug around for a while. I might have, with work, discovered the vagaries behind why the same programs, with the same (nominally) installed dependancies exhibited opposite behaviors on different machines. But no, by next month I’d probably just have a new and similar problem. So I do just what any irrational fellow ought to; I decide to install a virtual Arch distro (my favorite) with VMware fusion, mount the machine as a disk via ssh, and develop from there. At least in Arch, I will know exactly what is installed, where it is, and how it ought to be working. Basically, I eliminate the free variable of imprecise ignorance regarding everything that’s on the machine, and whether I’ve hacked it up manually. Of course, god forbid that I give up TextMate and actually code directly on a linux machine. Emacs is awesome for my more lispy projects, but I like TM for rails.

To be clear, the blame here is almost entirely on me. However, given the recent announcement of  the iPad, I feel that it’s become the custom to lay down some hate. So here goes: Apple, you ought to implement a decent package management scheme. Some inconsistency with something I had installed (or worse, you put there) was messing things up. Sure, one might say that I use pacman (or yum, or insert-reader-favorite) as a crutch, and I’m fine with that. In particular, said management helps prevent people like me — overly exuberant installers and occasional hackers of who-knows-what – from messing up systems.

So on the one hand, I get what I want. Things tend to work on Arch, and updating is only a `pacman -Syu` away. On the other hand — yeah, I’m dumb.