$ cat /home/buntine/mind_melting_brilliance

Installing ImageMagick + RMagick seems to be a common source of problems. Here is my eventual solution.

I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of yum. And this latest experience has not helped my disposition. There is an ImageMagick(-devel) package in the repository, but it's very old now requires an earlier version of RMagick. I also found that it didn't work with the FileColumn Rails plugin ("Invalid image" error).

I recommend, for CentOS 5.x atleast, that you build ImageMagick from source.

0) Install all the dependencies (yum should be fine for these):

• libjpeg - Read/write Jpeg files
• libpng - Read/write Png files
• freetype - Support for fonts

1) Grab ImageMagick and unpack it

$ wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf ImageMagick.tar.gz
$ cd ImageMagick-x.x.x

2) Compile and install ImageMagick. Note, these are the flags I used for my own server. Use --help to see a full list of the options.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-static --with-modules --without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8
$ make
$ sudo make install

3) Play the waiting game. Or you can have a sword fight with an employee. :)

4) Install the latest version of the RMagick gem

$ sudo gem install rmagick

5) For good measure, open up IRB and see if it's installed correctly.

$ irb
> require 'RMagick'
> true

Good luck in your adventures, people.

Yesterday I found myself in a position where some horrendously ugly code just became too much for me to handle. To cut a long story short, I needed to decouple a custom library from ActiveRecord. How did it get there in the first place, you ask? Please don't. It's a tragic story...

I set up an experimentation environment (in seperation from my working app), but of course, I needed to temporarily have full access to my models, controllers, etc, etc. Now, I use version control (who doesn't?) and I could have simply branched off and started hacking. But for shits-and-giggles, I decided not to.

I played around for a while and, as it turns out, it's very easy to load your application into an otherwise independent Ruby script. All you need is:

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = 'development'
require '/path/to/your/rails/app/config/environment'

Easy!

As a final note, it's worth pointing out that this is something that you should basically never need to do. If you simply want to automate something or perform an application-specific task, I highly recommend you write a raketask instead.