cmd_twitter.rb

I soon came to notice that the problem was because the Barnes&Noble wifi session had expired and I had to reconnect to their network. After getting my laptop online, I tried to install the gem, but once again I was still getting the invalid gem error. This was even after I removed the gem from all Ruby installations (RVM) and tried to install them from scratch. Knowing that the issue was caused because the files were partially downloaded, I removed both cache gem files and voila, I was able to install the pony rubygem.

While it would be wonderful if every single rubygem package would be digitally signed of some sort, it would have been helpful if at least it had some sort of checksum verification after it downloads the package prior to installing any gems. This is certainly somewhat scary since rubygems is not able to detect/verify that it downloaded the right package without any sort of alterations.

sudo apt-get install git git-core git-doc git-svn
mkdir Git_Repos/rvm
cd Git_Repos/rvm
git config --global user.name "Alpha01"
git config --global user.email "root@rubyninja.org"
git config --global core.editor /usr/bin/vim
git init
bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

Congratz, I just installed rvm and cloned my very first git repository.

I’ll definitely come back to this book and use as a reference. Anyone new or already experienced using Ruby, will definitely benefit from reading this book. I hope this book (all editions) gets the high praise from the Ruby community, which it deserves, as in my eyes this is a classic programming book and I see this title as the Llama/Camel book for the Ruby World.

Chapter 1: Let’s Get it Started: Installing Ruby
Chapter 2: Programming == Joy: A Whistle-Stop Tour of Ruby and Object Orientation
Chapter 3: Ruby’s Building Blocks: Data, Expressions and Flow Control
Chapter 4: Developing a Basic Ruby Application
Chapter 5: The Ruby Ecosystem
Chapter 6: Classes, Objects, and Modules
Chapter 7: Projects and Libraries
Chapter 8: Documentation, Error Handling, Debugging, and Testing
Chapter 9: Files and Databases
Chapter 10: Deploying Ruby Applications and Libraries
Chapter 11: Advance Ruby Features
Chapter 12: Tying it Together: Developing a Larger Ruby Application
Chapter 13: Ruby on Rails: Ruby’s Killer App
Chapter 14: Ruby and the Internet
Chapter 15: Networking, Sockets, and Daemons
Chapter 16: Useful Ruby Libraries and Gems

Beginning Ruby (2nd Edition)
5/5

Upgrading was really easy, essentially on both CentOS and on Ubuntu I installed Ruby 1.9 directly from source, while I was able to install Ruby 1.9 on the Mac using Mac Ports.

The only thing that problem that I noticed in doing this, is that my existing Rubygems installation crapped out, which really isn’t a problem since I was able to successfully install a new version of Rubygems. So far the only incompatibilty that I have noticed so far is the Crypt gem which is not yet been updated to work with Ruby 1.9. There is an unofficial port called Crypt19, buts it’s such horribly undocumented (giving the library implementation is not helpful) that I couldn’t get my existing scripts to work using this library.

Now hopefully I’ll find more features on Ruby 1.9 that are worth doing the upgrade.

I originally planned on writing a full mail (Unix command line email client) like program in Ruby. Though I was able to have an almost identical console interface to mail’s reading, viewing, and deleting emails, using POP. I was having a really hard time, keeping the connection alive after a certain number of seconds after initiating the connection.

So instead of having the incoming POP email client like usage that mail provides, I instead wrote the application to only support the mail sending features almost similar to mailx.

I would think developers or anyone wanting to send email from a Linux/Unix server without the hassle of sendmail, postfix, exim, etc… may find this simple program useful. I know I do, since I always find myself wanting to easily send emails from the command line whenever I’m using or doing some sort of testing on a Virtual Machine.

If you’ve ever used mail on a Linux/Unix system to send email messages, Ruby cli_mailer is practically identical.

Basic Usage:
Will get prompt to write email message that gets sends to root@rubyninja.net and blinds copy ccemailaddress@rubyninja.org

rcli_mailer.rb -s 'Title of message' -c ccemailaddress@rubyninja.org root@rubyninja.net

Will email the contents of sendmail.cf to root@rubyninja.net

cat /etc/mail/sendmail.cf | rcli_mailer.rb -s 'God help me' root@rubyninja.net


rcli_mailer.rb -s "I'm so sorry" -c jrsysadmin@rubyninja.net root@rubyninja.net < /etc/postfix/main.cf

NOTE: Ctrl-D is NOT supported by Ruby cli_mailer at the moment, you'll need to use the '.' (dot) character
to send the email message.

I tried to make Ruby cli_mailer as moduler as possible, since I'm planning adding the project to github, and I already have in mind more features to add into it.

Enjoy
rcli_mailer-01.tar.gz

Documentation
rdoc

The only quirk, which was entirely my fault for being lazy, was not reading the portion of the documentation where it mentions that the default environment is set to production. This gave me quite a headache as I couldn’t figure out why I had to restart Apache every time I modified any controller code (RoR noob).

My fix:
.htaccess
RailsEnv development

I’m amazed on Phusion’s work, the company responsible for the module. As they’ve take something that’s been historically difficult to deploy (at least I think) and made it really simple.
http://www.modrails.com/

Now I have documentation for the dead simple Ruby script that I wrote to encode videos for my iphone.
iphone_encode.rb documentation

One thing I would’ve like changed the author to change was on the database chapter, as it was mainly focused on SQLite. It would have been better if the author used MySQL instead. Also it would have been better if the author removed the dedicated chapter to Rails, and instead extended the chapter to have more generic web related like Net::HTTP, given how powerful that single class is.

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Simple Scripts
Chapter 3: Simple Types
Chapter 4: Array, Ranges, and Hashes
Chapter 5: Control structures
Chapter 6: Creating Methods
Chapter 7: Creating Classes
Chapter 8: Inheritance and More
Chapter 9: Modules and Includes
Chapter 10: Regular Expressions
Chapter 11: Debugging and Error Handling
Chapter 12: Rubygems
Chapter 13: Directories and Files
Chapter 14: Databases
Chapter 15: Networking
Chapter 16: Ruby on Rails
Chapter 17: Dynamic Programing

I would highly recommended this book to anybody starting or wanting to learn Ruby.
Ruby-Visual-QuickStart
4/5

New Apache configuration file:

The Apache eRuby SetHandler (rhtml) was not able to render any html/ruby pages, while regular ruby scripts (.*rb) were able to run just fine.

Apache log error:
[Sun Aug 08 20:56:15 2010] [error] mod_ruby: (eval):45: (eval):45: uninitialized constant Apache::ERubyRun (NameError)

FIX:

Specify the absolute path to the eRuby Apache module in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/apache/eruby-run.rb.

Change  line 45

require ‘eruby’

to

require “/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-linux/eruby.so”

Restart Apache and eRuby should render html/ruby pages as expected.

I hope people find this useful (and save a headache) as I spent about 5 hours researching this problem and I wasn’t able to find this fix anywhere.