Free? Yes, that’s right! A totally free Ruby on Rails book. Those fine fellows at Rails Envy mentioned it in episode #2 of the Rails Envy Podcast. What’s the catch? You only have 37 days from today to download this book. Do it now! Thanks to Patrick Lenz for writing the book and thanks to the guys at Rails Envy for making it known.

If you’re running into the above error message when trying to perform a Rails migration on Debian or Ubuntu then you might try adding the following line to your database.yml file:

socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

My database.yml file looks sorta like this:

development:
  database: crunchlife_development
  adapter: mysql
  host: localhost
  username: mysql_user
  password: @!#?@!
  socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock 

test:
  database: crunchlife_test
  adapter: mysql
  host: mysql.ryanbaxter.net
  username: mysql_user
  password: @!#?@!
  socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

production:
  database: crunchlife_production
  adapter: mysql
  host: mysql.ryanbaxter.net
  username: mysql_user
  password: @!#?@!

Good luck and happy migrations!

Kalid, from BetterExplained.com, has posted an excellent explanation of the hows and whys behind version control. The article takes an agnostic approach to versioning, but its examples will be more beneficial if Subversion is used. Kalid’s explanation also contains the definitions of words commonly used in the versioning nomenclature. I like this. You may read Kalid’s article and think, “Yeah, tell me something I don’t already know.”, but it is written in terms that your PHB (Pointy-Haired Boss) might understand. Spread the good word.