In this context, an appliance is a ready-to-run virtual machine. No set up to speak of required.

But why? Isn’t it easy to install Ruby wherever you like?

That is very true.

However, the Ruby ecosystem is very *NIX centric. Not everyone has the luxury, or time or ability, to setup and maintain a UNIX-like operating system.

Virtualization and thus appliances turn operating systems into just another kind of program. They reduce the risk of using a different operating system. Further, not everyone using Ruby wants to, or can, dig through C extensions to make them work on their operating system of choice. The hurdles as a Windows user are too high in most cases.

An appliance makes it easier to setup test environments, so they are great for seasoned developers, as well!

You can start with a clean slate, only Ruby, RubyGems, and a compiler tool chain are installed, and you can easily revert to this blank slate at the push of a button. With the different networking tools in today’s VM tools, you can even test network deployment of Rails applications.

So here is my proposal:

To create the best possible Ruby appliance and experience, I want to know which Gems and tools the Ruby community sees as essential to make life as a Rubyist easier.

Submit your ideas, and the Ruby Appliance will benefit and with that, all of the Ruby community.

Speaking of which: Praising “open” and using Macs, makes a hypocrite at best, and an idiot at worst. Use OpenSolaris, *BSD, or Linux if you want to be open in spirit. Or, like me, stop bothering, and use what you are comfortable with, and stop pretending you use it for any other reason than that you are comfortable with it.

Anyway. vim.

After nano, vim is the best editor in the world (once you get used to its idiosyncrasies), making editing code, or plain ol’ text a breeze, and its distinction between editing and normal mode is quite sweet.

But, while using the official (well, as official as open source gets) gVim 7.2 distribution from vim.org, I noticed that it is compiled with -ruby (and -perl, or -python). Neither :ruby nor :rubyf work. Which makes the hack, test, hack, test cycle not smooth at all, since :rubyf % doesn’t work.

Fortunately, fixing this is easy, once you know how:

Install the official gVim 7.2 distribution, and get Wu Yongwei’s gVim build. replace the binariesof  your vim installation with the ones in his gVim 7.2 distribution. Done. This works even with the MinGW Ruby distribution from RubyInstaller.org.

Happy Vimming.

Looking for hints how to create MCE playlists for videos (for series, or all those screencasts you downloaded off of Confreaks), I found this: Video Playlists For VMC.

The gist of it is:

    In Windows Media Player create an .asx playlist of your videos (Under “Any Playlist” in the file type selection dropdown), and
    save it in Path\to\your\videos\Playlists (similar to the Music playlists).
    Done.

Navigating to your playlist folder, you’ll find the playlist, and MCE will recognize it as a video playlist.

For an additional gimmick, MCE picks up a JPG with the same name as the playlist as a thumbnail for easy identification.