I constantly stumble on this problem when deploying an application that requires ImageMagick 6.6.x or better on CentOS RHEL 5. This is especially true when attempting to install the RMagick 2 gem. Unfortunately, I have not found a trusted yum repo to install ImageMagick 6.6.x, so I found the necessary RPM’s on the ImageMagick FTP. Here is my magick “recipe”. I ought to make this a Chef recipe, but in the meantime…

yum install freetype-devel ghostscript-devel libwmf-devel jasper-devel lcms-devel bzip2-devel librsvg2 librsvg2-devel libtool-ltdl-devel libXt-devel libtiff-devel

yum remove ImageMagick

ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/linux/CentOS/x86_64/

rpm -i ImageMagick-6.6.4-8.x86_64.rpm
rpm -i ImageMagick-c++-6.6.4-8.x86_64.rpm
rpm -i ImageMagick-devel-6.6.4-8.x86_64.rpm
rpm -i ImageMagick-doc-6.6.4-8.x86_64.rpm
rpm -i ImageMagick-perl-6.6.4-8.x86_64.rpm
rpm -i ImageMagick-c++-devel-6.6.4-8.x86_64.rpm

How do I test a stack of modular (multiple) Sinatra applications with Cucumber? Honestly, I was a bit baffled about how I would get my env.rb to load my config.ru the way it should be loaded. Specifically, I wanted Cucumber to run features with my Rack::Map and other middleware just the same as when my [...]

More to come… git@github.com:techwhizbang/sinatra_slideshow_code.git git@github.com:techwhizbang/sinatra_slideshow_code.git Recorded audio from the presentation Unbeknownst to me, Sinatra was once of the presenations at #RubyKaigi 2010 in Japan. What’s really amazing to me is that on the other side of the world two speakers were basically spreading the good word in a very similar way. Of the many similarities [...]

This is my personal Git cheat sheet. It is really a mish-mosh of other resources across the web. Yep, there are a million of them. This one isn’t special, but it is useful to me. If it works for you too, awesome; if not, move on. create a remote branch from master git checkout -b [...]

The debate between developers and DBAs regarding the use of stored procedures is an old one. Most developers I know would rather not use a stored procedure unless absolutely necessary. Don’t get me wrong, when every last bit of code has been optimized and that highly transactional or trafficked portion of your application is still [...]

I realize that there are certain things I took for granted back home since moving to the Bay area. One of these things is Giordano’s pizza. Hands down the best stuffed pizza anywhere. A truckload of cheese, spinach, delicious sauce, and a crusty buttery pie-like crust == heaven. Rumor has it there a some places [...]

By now you’ve at least heard about Chef or perhaps you’ve thought about evaluating it. If you haven’t heard about Chef, no worries, let me explain. Chef is an open source infrastructure automation framework written in Ruby by the guys at OpsCode for developers. In my opinion, OpsCode has hit a grand slam home run [...]

I find myself infinitely fascinated by the increasing number of dynamic languages. For many of us dynamic language introduction came by way of Ruby, Python, and/or Javascript. While my fascination with these languages hasn’t ended, I am more enthralled with dynamic languages whose strength is concurrency and multi-threading. Indeed, these are exciting times and there is a shift happening in the software community. Honestly, who hasn’t bragged on Twitter that they just finished reading the latest book on Clojure, or Erlang? Clearly there is momentum and change in the air. The future of software and computing in the next 10 or 15 years is being shaped and molded with the underlying fundamentals and principles of these languages.