So while working on ShoutReel, I had to upgrade to a newer version of RubyGems in order to use the i18n version of the geokit gem.  When I upgraded, it said I was missing all the gems for the app.  Consulting with my friend who told me that when upgrading RubyGems, you also have to re-install all the gems for the app.

This is just a newb note for myself as well as anyone on the Internet having this issue.

A while ago, I attempted to start using Ubuntu, but failed to install it on an old gateway laptop that didn’t have any linux drivers for audio, visual and wifi devices. Or at least I couldn’t find any online for the laptop. Due to the failure in getting it to work, I stopped my Ubuntu journey. I wasn’t ready for it. Skip forward a year later and I found myself installing Ubuntu 10.04 on my newer HP laptop. Installation was a breeze and everything worked out of the box except for some issues with double fingers on the touchpad and the right/left click ares on it. I was impressed. Wifi, bluetooth, sound, video, and pretty much everything worked instantly with Ubuntu.

As soon as I started to use it for a few hours, I noticed they took a some of their UI from Apple’s OS X and Windows. It’s the best from both OSs combined into one. Workspaces is cool. I’ve never experienced that working on Windows. I find that very useful when multitasking. I also like the way alt-tab works when switching from one item to another.

The best part of it all is developing with Ubuntu, which is the main reason I switched. I was having a hard time dealing with Windows and developing with Ruby on Rails. On Ubuntu it was extremely fast for obvious reasons. I haven’t tried developing in PHP or Java yet, but will soon.

We’ve made some updates to Shoutreel. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Want to create a static page with this type of url like yoursite.com/about for a Rails app? Well I had to just that for an app I am currently building.

Basically it involves a controller and added a route to routes.rb. The first step is to create a simple controller:

class StaticController < ApplicationController
def about
end
end

I called my controller static, but you can call it whatever you want. In the views/static directory I created a simple about.html.erb file with the html:

Then in the routes.rb I added the route:

map.static 'about', :controller => 'static', :action => 'about'

And that's basically it. This is a really basic way of creating static pages in Rails. There are definitely more advanced and probably much better ways of dong this. Since I'm just a beginner this is what I did for now.