DEV_MEM.dump_to(:blog) – Multimedia systems blog

A few days of silence in the middle, but definitely progress in Windows land… Readline, new packages and more news…

Pure-Ruby Readline for the win!

If was the case that under your environment every time you use IRB your CPU went crazy, you will be happy to hear that we found the problem.

More than just find it, we put our some money to it and paid Park Heesob (from win32utils project fame) to code a Pure-Ruby Readline library.

The crazy part is that works on 1.8, 1.9, on Windows and Linux!, even more crazy, it also worked under Rubinius!

The code is in GitHub here

Latest packages in RubyInstaller download page have replaced the GNU Readline binary with it, and IRB now works normally.

Ruby 1.9.1-p129 got out.

As announced in Ruby-Lang website (here) 1.9.1-p129 went out last week.

While test on Windows for either trunk and 1.9.1 branch still segfault, I decided to do another release of this and put the 7zip packages in the downloads page at RubyInstaller.

Yes, no official Windows Installer yet, still need to iron some quirks (mentioned in previous post here)

Again, you can download those from usual place

Moved to Windows 7

I definitely been one of the late adopters in OS changes. Been using Windows XP for work for the past 7 years (moved directly from Windows NT4) — yeah, love to skip versions.

So decided to install latest Release Candidate as main OS, and start using it. So far, the experience has been great.

Keep in mind that I rarely turned my laptop off or restarted it (even with XP). Sleep and hibernation are the two options I mostly use, and haven’t restarted the computer since installed Windows 7, so is good

The following is a list of things I noticed that will love to expand in other posts:

Mount Users in other partition, don’t keep with your system

Like on Linux, dedicate a partition to your personal files, so I did it for the user folder. Is tricky, but can be done. This ease the restoration process of the OS since you don’t need to worry about losing your personal files.

Set HOME

Ensure HOME get set to %HOMEDRIVE%@%HOMEPATH%@. This is to make RubyGems and Ruby expansion of @~@ will work properly (and avoid nasty issues with known scripts or gems).

Console 2 halts

For some reason, the combo of Console 2 and VIM when working with Git just halts, not accepting any input. This also affected IRB, which lead me to think that is readline related.

Anyhow, installed GVim and installed Fabio Akita’s vimfiles (instructions here)

Then, ensured Git uses it doing git config --global core.editor gvim

Hidden files behave as read only?

Found that Ruby and some programs don’t let you modify hidden files. They just return access denied.

This seems weird, since Notepad can edit those files without issues.

Will investigate further, seems a bad usage of Windows API.

Don’t pollute your system.

Put all your tools, DLLs and your scripts in your user folder. Mine is %HOME%\Tools\bin, add this to your User environment variables: %HOME%\Tools\bin, et voila!

Don’t copy files to system32 blindly, this includes SQLite3, MySQL or any of these tools, putting things there make things harder to find or update later.

Also, that requires Admin rights, which are annoying if you don’t have them (I have UAC to the highest value to avoid do any stuff that normal non-admin users will do).

See my Tools layout

Some gem issues and news

While doing the move to new OS, decided to build a few gems again, and maybe update them.

MySQL 5.1 and mysql gem are a nightmare, stick to 5.0 for now.

Yeah, it seems that mysql Ruby C Extension have several memory issues. Stick to 5.0 for know (or switch to DataMapper, I heard they got things working on Windows!)

Been working in my own fork to support MinGW properly. Check the code at GitHub:

http://github.com/luislavena/mysql-gem

Almost 100% cross-platform SQLite3 ruby gem!

Lot of progress on this, partially stolen from do_sqlite3 (and viceversa!)

My fork here is capable to build Windows binaries on Linux/OSX.

Ideas of making fat binaries are around, but I believe this can be worked out with some love to RubyGems (discussed last year).

Will make binaries of those gems this week.

So, what are you waiting for?

Start using it!, like Mike Hodgson that reported his success here