Partial success!
For a good chunk of yesterday, I was trying to ""port"" my exceedlingly simple Ruby application to Windows. The hitch? It uses Gosu (game engine), Chipmunk (physics engine), ImageMagick (popular graphics tool), and RMagick (wrapper for ImageMagick in Ruby). With the help of RubyScript2Exe it almost, almost worked. Gosu and Chipmunk had no problem, as they had no-strings-attached .so files and apparently were programmed well. ImageMagick, despite trying to be a pain in the ass by making me include an extra dozen DLLs in my project folder, actually did end up working. But RMagick...when moving the generated app to a new computer that didn't have ImageMagick installed freaked out with a weird "address not accessible" error or something. After some fiddling I gave it up as a lost cause and dropped support for ImageMagick+RMagick. The only reason they were there in the first place is because I wanted to load SVG files whenever possible, and possibly have some dynamic graphic generation, but...the former isn't that great anyway, and the latter will have to be done other ways, if at all.
So, yes, Ruby+Gosu+Chipmunk play just fine with RubyScript2Exe on both Windows and Linux.
Distributing Ruby Apps
So I'm pondering the idea of writing a game...but I want it to be playable on Windows and Linux, and I want it to be available on Linux without much trouble. I've made a couple interesting discoveries, in terms of applications to help me do this.
spud! feedback #2
This time, I had an inquiry about a specific product. The product description said it was made in Eugene, OR, but the text at the bottom of the page said it was made 3000 miles away! Considering I live in Seattle, I thought there must be a bug (or is there?). The product page specifically is this one, which normally comes in a small popup. I sent an email about this discrepancy and got back a response...check it out in the full post.
spud! feedback
I wrote spud! a couple email questions recently and am posting them here in case anyone's curious about a response. The first was a general question about how spud! compares to CSAs and co-ops.
Question on the full post.
Free Web Services??
I think it'd be great if there was a hosted repository of web services that you could hit up for free.
If I were to make one...
It'd be hosted and allow a certain number of requests/hour, in the ballpark of 100. It'd be hosted by Merb, be heavily cached, and have certain plugins available like hpricot for parsing HTML and XML. Finally, it'd be able to serve up resutls in HTML, XML, JSON, or YAML.
Each service made would have to be reviewed by me before getting public access. Anyone would be able to contribute to the site, though that might be somewhat complicated. Additionally, heavy users could be charged minor sums in order to get more use out of the site. A small premium could even be charged for the benefit of the person who put together the site (me) and possibly the person who wrote the service. Later on, there could be more computationally intensive services, like converting a .doc or .txt into a .pdf.
Ideas!
So I always have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head. I think I'm going to try to write about them here before attempting to implement them, partly so I can just walk through the idea and get it down in writing.
On that note, one of my recent ideas was this idea of a "distributed webserver". Okay, great, turns out it's actually been done and/or researched before. But I hadn't quite found the idea I was thinking about. My idea was to have a [email protected] the same way you have [email protected] or [email protected] or BOINC. The goal would be to have a distributed webserver that ran on untrusted clients with full site rendering and database capaibilities, serving pages to users' browsers. Sounds like sort of a cool idea, right? Distributed stuff is always cool, plus you might actually get better end-user performance if you whip some geocoding into the mix (i.e. servers are picked based on proximity to user). To install on your server, you could download what would essentially be VirtualBox plus an image, and then run a bit of config and be good to go.
My inspiration for the idea is that it would be cool to be able to get a VPS for myself and sell the excess cycles/bandwidth/storage to web sites I like.
Mini notebooks galore
This article has a good list of recent notebooks to keep an eye out for: http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9962473-1.html
merb_multi_js
I'm writing a plugin right now to add some built-in JS functionality to Merb. It's coming along pretty well, but is still pretty raw and not specced, though it does have SOME documentation. It's available at http://github.com/nanodeath/merb_multi_js/wikis/home. If you have questions, you're encouraged to send me a message at Freenode#merb.
Tutorials??
In the time I have in the future, I'll try to write a couple tutorials for merbful_authentication and possibly DM (once I learn how to use it 
). Should be fun...I think I'll upload them to merbunity.
Merb and the edit form
This was surprisingly difficult for me, so I thought I'd pass a little along.
For the "New Idea" page, my form_for looks like this:
<% form_for(@idea, :action => url(:ideas)) do |f| %>
For my "Edit Idea" page, my form_for looks like this:
<% form_for(:idea, :action => url(:idea, @idea)) do |f| %>
I'm not sure how the heck that works out, but it does (merb 0.9.3)