If I know you, you don’t have Ruby 1.8.3 installed. And why not? Because of a YAML bug which broke RubyGems (my fault) and a Logger incompatibility with Rails (for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call that my fault as well.) Now, since I really know you so well, I know that you’ll probably wait until after Christmas to install Ruby 1.8.4. I guess you don’t want to spoil the surprise.

I urge you: please spoil the surprise. Give Ruby 1.8.4 preview 3 a whirl. Matz just minted the thing a couple of minutes ago.

Please, donate a few minutes:

  wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.4-preview3.tar.gz
  tar xzvf ruby-1.8.4-preview3.tar.gz
  cd ruby-1.8.4
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
  make
  make install

  export PATH="$HOME/local/bin:$PATH" 
  ruby your_test_script.rb

  cd /your/rails/app
  ruby script/server

Best of all, install a few gems to this local copy of Ruby and help us make sure it’s all okay! Let’s not have any 1.8.4 evacuees this time.

Just wrapped things up. I’m really pleased with the last half of this tutorial. I’m sure I’ve introduced a bunch of bugs in my haste to add the virtual filesystem and a couple of libraries to the mix.

The most glorious addition is a simple HTML generation library. Want to try it out? Go to Try Ruby and run this:

 require 'popup'

 Popup.make do
   h1 "Things To Do" 
   list do
     p "Try out Ruby" 
     p "Ride a tiger" 
     p "(down River Euphrates)" 
   end
 end

Also, the upsy quizzies are fixed in Firefox for Windows. You can type slashes now. So sorry about all that. I’ll pretty things up over the next few days.