Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

There are a few cardinal sins for a developer: deleting the production database, deploying code to the wrong machine, and sending out emails to all the mock users. These situations happen because the terminal window on production looks an awful lot like the terminal window on dev. I don’t have solutions to the first two problems, but preventing emails to the test user database is pretty easy in Ruyb on Rails.
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In a week that included running 10 kilometers for the first time in over 12 months, getting jabbed with a needle for a blood test, and setting a personal best for the cycle ride to the office, by far the most painful was trying to get RMagick installed on a Centos5 box.

For starters, the RMagick 2.x series requires ImageMagick 6.3.0 (which came out in early 2006). Of course, CentOS5 ships with ImageMagick 6.2.28. I understand the need for stability. But what’s a developer to do if COBOL isn’t a viable solution?

David Bock’s website suggests to try the older version. Which worked, kinda. However, the rmagick build threw up while running sanity checks. The issue is that I didn’t have the Microsoft True Type Fonts installed. Now to find an easy way to install them.

More googleing lead me to Corefonts, which has the installation instructions. I followed these directions and tried again.

Same error.

The finally step is to link the directory with the fonts to where ImageMagick wants them to be.

ln -s /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType

One more gem install and everything is happy.

As rock-solid as Centos is, I’m getting very reluctant to recommend it anymore because of issues like this. Unless you’re running software that’s older or from a commercial vendor, it’s just not worth it. Eventually you’re going to want a library, a major upgrade or a snazzy new language that’s going to make you jump through all sorts of crazy hoops.