Installing rmagick

by balint

I needed to install rmagick for a Rails project. I had some amount of trouble along the way but finally succeeded so I am sharing my experience in case you bump into the same problems.

I first installed the binary OS-X distribution of imagemagick (no problems here) and then attempted to install rmagick, the ruby interface to the ImageMagick libraries:

sudo gem install rmagick

However, I received the following unpleasant error:

Can't install RMagick 2.7.2. Can't find MagickCore.h.

I checked that the header file is there (on the path the install script was looking for it), and decided not to go the hard way. After some googling I found there is a rmagick-osx-installer which downloads, compiles and installs ImageMagick and rmagick. Just what I needed.

However, the script failed to accomplish its mission, it hung when installing rmagick. Taking a peak in its log I saw several other errors so I had to look for another way. And that way was compiling the ImageMagick library myself. So I downloaded the source, made the configuration-make-make install cycle and fortunately everything went smoothly. The good news is I could install rmagick without any problem after that:

balint$ sudo gem install rmagick
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed rmagick-2.7.2
1 gem installed

Refuting Rails myths

by balint

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails is doing an outstanding series of blog posts on his blog to derail (pun intended) some common myths that claim Rails does not do this or that and that hinders (or rather, slows down) its widespread acceptance.

I am sure David holds his best for last and will refute the infamous “Rails does not scale” in the final episode of the series.

ConferenciaRails 2008: enhorabuena!

by balint

I have just returned from Madrid where the Spanish Rails Conference, Conferencia Rails was held. I liked it quite a lot, there were several interesting talks most of which made me want to learn all of that and very fast (one thing conferences do to me is to boost that healthy feeling of wanting to always learn and discover new things). So I would like to add my e-voice to the web noise: congratulations and thank you to the organizers and presenters!