Have you upgraded RubyGems lately? Is your console suddenly filled with warnings like this?

NOTE: Gem::Specification#default_executable= is deprecated with no replacement. It will be removed on or after 2011-10-01.
Gem::Specification#default_executable= called from /Users/chaffee/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0/specifications/thin-1.2.7.gemspec:10.

You may be showing signs of a new malady known as Warningitis! So far there is no cure, but doing the following will temporarily cure your symptoms:

gem update --system 1.7.2

Several experimental treatments are being hastily developed as well, but these have not yet been approved by the FDA. Check the "scary warnings are scary" bug thread for more details.

This has been a public health alert. Please do not panic. SARS masks and iodine pills are not recommended at this time.

Uh-oh!

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::RemoteFetcher::FetchError)
    bad response Moved Permanently 301 (http://gems.rubyforge.org/latest_specs.4.8)

Whew!

gem sources -a http://rubygems.org/
gem sources -r http://gems.rubyforge.org/

Looks like they weren't kidding when they said to switch from rubyforge to rubygems.org (née gemcutter)!

[Edited to change "http://production.s3.rubygems.org/" to "http://rubygems.org/". Note that the trailing slash is significant!]

Remember the annotate_models rake task? Dave Thomas wrote it many years ago and it corrects one of the flaws in ActiveRecord: it describes the schema for a table as a comment inside the Ruby model file that it maps to. Unfortunately Dave hasn't had time to maintain it, so a couple of years ago I cleaned up some bugs and re-published it as a pastie. Then Cuong Tran made it a gem and put it on Github, and since then, there's been a whole lotta forkin' goin' on!

I recently pulled in a bunch of the forks into ctran's master branch, and just pushed it to Gemcutter as version 2.4.0. Just run gem sources and make sure http://gemcutter.org is in your list -- otherwise do gem source -a http://gemcutter.org -- and sudo gem install annotate and it'll install a binary called annotate in /usr/bin. See the README on github for more info and have fun!

One caveat: ImageMagick installs a tool called annotate too (if you're using MacPorts it's in /opt/local/bin/annotate). So if you see

Usage: annotate imagein.jpg imageout.jpg

then put /usr/bin ahead on the path and you'll get ours instead.

[Updated: added instructions "If you are using a widget in rails, you now need to inherit from RailsWidget"]

Erector has been around for almost 2 years now, but we've always been a little reluctant to market it heavily. One reason has been that the API was a little inelegant. Another is that Rails integration wasn't as seamless as we'd like.

With today's release of version 0.6.3, we have hopefully fixed both of those problems. With the new RailsWidget we've got a clean separation between core Erector functionality and the magic we need to make it work with Rails. We've renamed "render" to "content" so we don't conflict with the standard Rails render method. And we've changed the API for smoother lifecycle management -- the constructor is about initializing the widget, and the refurbished "widget" method is about setting it up to emit its HTML.

The bad news is that you'll have to change your existing code. The good news is there's an update guide, which you'll find below the fold in this blog post.

Please visit our Google Group to register comments or complaints, our project web site for full documentation and FAQs, and feel free to clone or fork our GitHub repo.

(Why 0.6.3 and not 0.6.0? Because we had to work through some glitches in the new deploy process with GitHub and Jeweler and whatnot. We're only human...)

(Update -- version 0.3 released 2-Oct-07. Release notes are here.)

We use subversion for our source control. We love it. But we've noticed a few flaws, and a few weeks ago I decided I'd had enough and wrote a wrapper for it that fixes a few of the most glaring ones:

• Externals get messed up pretty frequently. If you remove or rename an external, the old one gets left around on disk, and if you convert an external to a "real" directory or vice versa then the next update simply fails.
• Externals are updated in series, not in parallel, meaning that if you have a lot of externals your updates can take an excruciatingly long time.
• Externals are updated even if they're frozen to a specific revision number, which wastes even more time on update.
• If you want a clean checkout -- say, for an automated build -- the only way to do it is to do a full checkout, even if 99% of the files are already there on disk.
• The co command is not compatible with the convention of putting files under /trunk, requiring you to type out your whole repository URL followed by /foo/trunk foo
• The name of the executable is hard to pronounce -- either "ess vee enn" or "seven", but nobody says "seven" except when they're saying "seven up", which is, I admit, a pretty good pun, but come on, how much cooler is it to say, "sub"?

The current version of sub fixes all of the above (except for converting directories to and from externals, and I'm going to make that work pretty soon).

Install with

sudo gem install sub

Help text is below the fold.