EYEHEARTZOMBIES

My God, this has been a horrible week for my web development work. Absolutely horrible…but only in two areas.

Well, not even two “areas”. Just two connected things that are driving me crazy.

In the development of Webpen, I’m using a wonderful little Rails mixin/gem (that’s basically a plugin to you non-Rails folk), to make objects taggable, like your photos on Flick or links in del.icio.us. Only two problems with it.

First, notice I haven’t provided any links to it? That’s ’cause there are none now. The developer’s site has gone AWOL and only the RubyForge page is still up, but that’s not the most helpful of sites when you have a problem like I do. What’s the problem? The freakin’ thing can’t use PostgreSQL, which is the database that I use here at home for my work. So I can’t test without uploading to the server. Which is a right pain in the ass since the server runs, rightly, in production mode. Which means I have to restart it for code changes to take effect. Which is more than I want to do.

This little problem leads me to the second one, MySQL. Now, I use an Apple iBook and it came with MySQL already installed. Which is fine and dandy at the beginning. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t bunged up their install of it and had to either reinstall or move on to something else. I moved on.

But now I need MySQL. Should be easy, I thought to myself this morning. I’ll just download the new package from mysql.com and upgrade. It’ll take all of 20 minutes and then I can get back to work.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I did download the new binaries and I did upgrade, but the MySQL server wouldn’t start. I removed the old install and the new and installed again. No dice. I did this a few more times.

Then I tried installing from source. That didn’t work either. Don’t know why, but it didn’t. I nearly cried.

So furter removal, got rid of anything I could find, even removed /tmp/mysql.sock. Nothing, even though everything was returning as successful. Time to move to a better environment, I decided.

After SSH-ing into my Ubuntu box, I tried to install MySQL there. Well, that would have worked I think, but my apt-get can’t connect to the servers. So I download the Linux binary and try it. Nope, no go.

So now I’m waiting on the Linux source package to finish the make cycle. If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’ll do. Probably scrap the tags and find another way to represent abstract grouping.

Anyone have any ideas for either the server or the gem?

UPDATE

Well, something must have worked, ’cause MySQL is working now (which means tags are, woot!).