1. Reboot. All Windows programs hang. Well, its more to do with the OS than it is to do with the program itself. But sometimes they hang, and the best thing to do when it does is relaunch. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and go to the Task Manager and force the progroam to terminate and try launching again. If that doesn’t work, Ctrl-Alt-Del  to reboot your PC and this will usually work.
2. Reinstall. Sometimes, Windows programs have a habit of getting corrupted. So it’d be handy to keep a CD case of all your software with their license keys. So be prepared to spend half-a-day reinstalling and reconfiguring your software.
3. Repurchase. If all else fails. Buy a new one. The only reason why they make Windows computers is for it to fail you and for you to actually have a reason to buy a new computer.

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I was reading the BBC and I discovered the spam produces 17 million tons of Carbon Dioxide! How’s that for a good reason to ditch email? But as it is, 90% of online communication is done over email. It is indispensible in the business world as is akin to breathing. When I first started a business, and was using a Windows machine, and Outlook Express for email, I was amazed at the amount of crap I get everyday just managing electronic messages.

According to statistics of the day, 70% of email you receive each day is spam! A person spends 15 minutes a day on average dealing with spam. What I didn’t guess was this damning statistic at the amount of energy spam consumes. I didn’t think that far, as to the amount of power the servers needed to process this email, network to network, ip to ip.

One thing that I do at Verbeter is to think of solutions to improve the way we do business. It’s entrenched into my company culture that I created. Verbeter is a Dutch word, meaning, continuously improving. And I find or create solutions that improve the way we do our business including saving the environment.

Being a digital company, I’ve been able to do my bid in reducing my carbon footprint. For example, the antivirus that I distribute, Avast Antivirus, only comes as an electronic download. Its my policy, in fact also part of Alwil Software’s policy, to only distribute electronic download versions. This is our way to save costs, but most importantly save the environment.

Doing all these zen-ish things help me find my nirvana, and reducing the amount of spam in my business has boosted my productivity greatly. Do you get spammed often? What about viruses? Have you found your nirvana?

[poll id="3"]

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I was alerted on some issues on my deployment of our Ruby on Rails app on our Windows server.

We’re proxying our Mongrel cluster through Apache and apparently, our Apache seem to be behaving funny. When accessing http://www.domainexample.com/app1, without a trailing slash, I can see that Apache proxies to that app but the Ruby app can’t detect that it’s on app1 folder and all the paths go bonkers.

When a trailing slash is used like http://www.domainexample.com/app1/, the app works correctly. So after stabbing-in-the-Apache-dark for close to 4 more days, the solution, uniquely for me, was to remove one freaking line!

In Brian Hogan’s tutorial, you had to do the following in a file called httpd-proxy.conf:

ProxyPass /app1/ http://127.0.0.1:4000/
ProxyPass /app1 http://127.0.0.1:4000/
ProxyPassReverse /app1/ http://127.0.0.1:4000/

But the second line is unnecessary. However, when you remove it, it still has problems. You need to edit the 3rd line too. This is how apache will automatically add the trailing slash for you:

ProxyPass /app1/ http://127.0.0.1:4000/
ProxyPassReverse /app1 http://127.0.0.1:4000/

Notice that in ProxyPassReverse, app1 does not have a trailing slash. This somehow works for me and everytime I access the app without the trailing slash, everything works sweetly.

Some of you may also ask how do I get nice long names to display on the URI?

If you see my Prayer Locater app at http://www.reqa.com:8080/prayerlocater, the directory, prayerlocater is obviously more than 8 characters long.

Lets say, I had generated a new rails project on my very old Windows Server like this -> ruby rails anewproj

And then I launch the application on Mongrel using the port 8000.

In the httpd-proxy.conf file, do this, changes are made in red ->

##################### MONGREL #########################
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

ProxyRequests Off

<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>

#################################

Alias /prayerlocater “c:/web/anewproj/public”
<Directory “C:/web/anewproj/public”>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride none
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

ProxyPass /prayerlocater/images !
ProxyPass /prayerlocater/stylesheets !
ProxyPass /prayerlocater/javascripts !

ProxyPass /prayerlocater/ http://127.0.0.1:8000/
ProxyPassReverse /prayerlocater http://127.0.0.1:8000/

########################################

As you can see, ProxyPassReverse does not have a trailing slash on the Alias. What this does is that for every access to /prayerlocater, Apache will redirect to /prayerlocater/. This will make all non-trailing slash access complete with a trailing slash.

Hope you guys have a better understanding of how to deploy Ruby on Rails on Windows now.

This article is a partial. For complete understanding, please read the following article first ->

http://mag.typecanvas.com/2008/01/19/deploying-rails-to-an-old-windows-server/