workaround for “Malformed version number string mswin32″
People are reporting the error “Malformed version number string mswin32″ when unpacking or using unpacked Ruby gems in their Rails project. I ended up figuring this out because I ran into it while trying to unpack the sqlite3-ruby gem and couldn’t Google any fixes. Here’s the quick workaround (hack): 1. Look at your unpacked gems in vendor/gems and find any directories ending in “-x86-mswin32″. Change the directory name by removing “-x86-mswin32″. 2. Inside that same directory, there should be a file name “.specification”. Open that file with your text editor, find the line “platform: x86-wi

Chicago Fire sleaze their way to Eastern conference win
Chicago Fire in their home stadium in front of a sell-out crowd get lousy call after lousy call in their favor, culminating with a sleazy, foul-laden win over the New England Revolution to win the Eastern conference. To be completely fair, New England was mentally thrown off their game and was playing some lousy, sloppy defense, but this doesn’t make up for the litany of sins Chicago racked up. Here are just a few highlights: - Blanco goes down writhing in pain after a slightly rough body-to-body contact from a defender. Side ref who was right near the play says play on, but Blanco does his usual acting job rolling around on the ground (which he does literally eve

Hosting your app on GoDaddy from the site root
A quick tip for those who are hosting their Rails app (or any app really) on GoDaddy or other shared hosting sites where the app needs to be hosted from a subdirectory, e.g. http://www.mysite.com/my_app/ instead of just http://www.mysite.com. If you only have one application and want it to be hosted from your root URL, edit your top-level .htaccess file (where you see default GoDaddy files like welcome.html and missing.html) and add something like the following: # if the requested URL doesn't already start with /my_app/ then make it so RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^/my_app/.* RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /my_app/$1

Facebooker doesn’t play nice with relative_url_root
If you are using the Facebooker plugin to host your Facebook app with Ruby on Rails, be aware that it modifies ActionController::Base.relative_url_root and will break Rails sites that are not hosted at the root URL of their domain (e.g., http://www.mysite.com/my_rails_app). It’s more than likely I’m just not configuring the plugin correctly and need to go back over the docs and tutorials but it seems a little weird that this plugin just arbitrarily overrides relative_url_root. Maybe the designers were thinking you wouldn’t typically host your Facebook app and your normal web site from the same

In praise of Slicehost
I’ve been using Slicehost for some personal projects and prototype sites for about a year and, at the risk of sounding like I’m getting paid to pimp their service–which I absolutely am not, I gotta say I just love ‘em! I just moved a major web site from a 2GB dedicated server to a 512MB virtual slice (and it’s handling requests even faster than before after porting from Apache to Nginx + Phusion Passenger). What’s so good about Slicehost? Sign up for a server, put in a credit car