Someone said “Derek, you should write about the business you are trying to start, that way you can use it for a tax write off.  That is the good thing about America; they pay for your dreams.”  Everyone likes free stuff and America right?  Can I really buy stuff I want and have the government reward me for it?  The truth of my new housemate’s claim, until next tax season, matters none.  Building a web media company is one of my many dreams and writing about it does not seem like a bad idea.

Heading his advice I am now given: a way to organize my own thoughts, a public forum for my endeavors, a public forum for my humiliation and, most importantly, a place for written confessions of all the computer crimes that will inevitably and I swear accidentally commit.  It might also give me other stuff but I was never much one for introductions.  I hate da fluff, let’s get some logistics.  The purpose is stated.  Now I begin.

Holy crap. The national debt was $10 Trillion on Sept. 30, 2008 when estimates on the amount spent on the bail out was a modest $1 trillion. I don’t know if this means committed funds or money actually spent. What ever the case the bail out has reached $3.2 trillion with a committed $8.5 trillion. I guess we are trying to double our national debt in one year. Hooray America! The current estimates for the natinal debt do not even seem to acount for the current massive spendings. Acording to this article:

The $700 billion government bailout could send the national debt to more than $11 trillion, says the AP.

Well shit, its not $700 billion any more. If I had to do some simple math I’d say we are probably headed for somthing more in the range of say $18 Trillion within the next year. It sucks because we can all expect residual shittyness from Bush’s administration when Obama is in office.  An $8 trillion back lash is insane!

GLORY! After a butt load of research and tinkering my first words have trickled forth from the rails framework. The most glorious <h1>HelloWorld</h1> that I have ever experienced.

The hype for rails is caused by it’s apparent “swiftness”.  It was suppose to be quick to install and quick to develop with.   Yet the most recent Rails 2.2 seems to be trying to depreciate MySql which took me about 3 hours to figure out.  Derek is not amused.  I’m obviously a newbie to all this stuff and the majority of my woes were caused by reading outdated articles (2006.5).  Also it seems that you MUST have a database linked up to the whole rig before you can even spew out a hello world, something most tutorials fail to mention (most likely because they were written for earlier versions).  In the end I had to edit the config/database.yml file to suit my needs:

development:
adapter: mysql
encoding: utf8
database: test_development
pool: 5
username: root
password: (its a secret)
host: localhost

It turns out you can achieve this automatically if you create your file by typing the following in the CMD.

rails appName -d mysql

But wait, it still did not work. After more research I discovered that I had to uninstall MySql 5.1 and dl the older 5.0 and create the test_development table. Apparently the gems for MySql are not included in 2.2. The open source community must be trying to rebel against MySql. I must admit after typing my first 6 lines of MySql into the CMD i can’t blame them. I digress. Next I typed:

gem install mysql

Truthfully I don’t know if this really did anything. The CMD gave me some ambiguous error about Read me files and documentation not being created. I just ignored it assuming it was not important. Ok. Lets test again. Nope. Error cant find libmySQL.dll when I test in the browser.  So here’s the tricky part.  I finally found on hillemania blog that you have to manually copy the libmySQL.dll file from:

\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin

And put it in:

ruby\bin

Test. Holding breath…

<h1>HelloWorld</h1>

BOO YA! Best ever.