Yerg! I’ve been trying so hard to begin learning RoR, but I’m embarassed to say that I can’t even get it to install properly on my machine. It’s so bloody complicated & poorly documented (read: agile) that I’ve now fullly given up. I’m pretty used to frustratingly complex installation procedures — I am a drupal wonk, after all (yuk yuk). I’m patient, and I’m very comfortable with the command line, I swear I am. But this is just too much. I’ve spent at least 12 hours just installing Ruby, and it still doesn’t work.
Locomotive, the supposed RoR wonder-kid is no help (blasted SQLite & lightttpd, whatever you are!). Neither is the book “Agile Web Development with Rails”, which I, in my haste and desperate excitement, shelled out $60 to buy. Neither are the two articles I found for installing Rails piece by piece: this one & this one (the latter of which uses MacPorts, née DarwinPorts, which was at least kinda fun to revisit). In fact, nothing at all has helped, not even one bit. So I quit.
It’s sad — I really wanted to be one of those cool cool RoR guys that you see in the nice Vancouver cafés, sipping fancy whipped drinks & designing super-neat whizbang custom ajaxy CMSes and such. I really did. But alas, I guess I just won’t ever be one of them (or at least not until OSX 10.5 is released, with Rails included). Oh well. I’ll have to content myself to continue admiring them from afar.
It could be worse, I guess… I could be this guy.
Plus, there is a secret silver lining: while I was waiting for some piece of source code to compile fail, I looked up Ubuntu & discovered that there’s now (and maybe always was?) a PPC version of this most hallowed of linuxes. So I’m downloading that presently, with an eye toward converting my powerbook to a linux box (I have to do something to fight the urge to trade up to a macbook). I used to use linux, and I loved it. I think it’s time to give it a shot again. I only hope there’s fancy whipped drinks somewhere out there for linux kids, too. I really want some fancy whipped drinks right about now.
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