There are just so many people and they can have so many needs depending on the so many things they keep doing, its difficult to address everyone’s needs.

While Some people are unaware of the procedure to change filename extensions in Windows XP because they never bothered about it, there are others who work on making great web sites using different technologies and combinations built with technologies of which Ruby on Rails is one, some find it easy to follow tutorials but some need a guide to install it on Windows which can be considered as one of the easiest on noobs and user friendly OS.

There are people immediately when they find a need fot it while others wait for opinions and try to see how essential it is in the mean time. Some are satisfied while some are very frustrated like the Netfirms customers who were unable to setup wordpress permalinks on their blogs.

Ok all this is to make my blog more efficient by deep linking, sorry if you had to read through this, its not that bad isn’t it?

Its a well established and widely observed fact that when a blogger doesn’t post for a while then the next time he starts with one of the following messages

• I was very very very busy with my dog the whole time
• I had been out for a while touring the beautiful deserts of Iraq
• I really couldn’t manage so many things I had to go for a surgery to add an extra pair of limbs

and so on…..

Well everyone knows that you didn’t post because you couldn’t. Why bug people with your reasons? Just say I was lazy. Well I said it, I was lazy and busy and been out and so couldn’t manage to post.

Coming to the next part, its time to assure the readers so that they don’t run away from this part of the Internet

• I will keep posting regularly, from now on!
• I will make it a point to update now and then
• Now that I’m free I can keep you informed

Ok thanks for the assurance, we don’t want assurances but we want posts to feed this thing called the brain.

All this bragging is to make you feel that this blog is not dead! Yes its alive!

Note: Tutorial targeted at n00bs and is for a purely developer environemnt not suitable for a production environment (can be used as one but not recommended).

Ruby on Rails or just Rails is a framework for building web applications and is quite famous among the developers, first of all for the use of the wonderful language Ruby and next Rails itself is a wonderful piece of software in itself. Ruby is so english like and has a smooth learning curve especially for those new to programming than those who are used to some other language. Ofcourse when you are used to some language every other language seems to be strange.

Install Guide:

First of all you need to Download a few packages

Ruby Windows Installer – http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167
MySQL – http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#win32

The next thing you need depends on weather you have internet access on your developer machine or not, incase you have internet access, just use the following commandafter you have installed Ruby
gem install rails –include-dependencies

Incase you have problem installing using this command because you are currently on the plane or in the desert waging war against terror or may be worse behind a restrictive corporate proxy server, you need to download the gem files and install them individually.

First of all download the latest Rails gem from

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=307

donwload the file with the .gem extension and then run this command

gem install gem-name-x.x.x –local

example – gem install rails-1.2.3 –local

The gem file should be in the path or else change to the directory where you put the file and then run the command else you are going to get gem file not found error

When you enter the above command it gives an error message saying rail-1.2.3 needs some-other-gem-1.x.x , these are called dependencies, you need these installed before you install rails, so you need to download these gem packages too, so search for the gem file missing at the rubyforge site
I have made a list of dependecnies for the latest version of rails – rails-1.2.3

rake (>= 0.7.2)

http://rubyforge.org/projects/rake/
activesupport (= 1.4.2)

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=570&release_id=10359
activerecord (= 1.15.3)

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=182&release_id=10363
actionpack (= 1.13.3)

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=249&release_id=10360
actionmailer (= 1.3.3)

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=361&release_id=10365
actionwebservice (= 1.2.3)

http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=567&release_id=10366

grab the latest release of gem files at these project pages and install them using the common command

gem install gemname-1.x.x –local

Once you get rails installed, you can be sure that is has succesfully installed along with all the dependencies. You might wonder, dont these things need a web server like Apache? The answer is yes and no, its actually not necessary but sure is an optio. Ruby has a build in web server WEBrick, which lets you get started and running with just one command, no install needed!

Now that you have a developer Rails environemnt setup, you can go whip a new rails application in minutes with this tutorial at IBM Developer Works

I was a bit freaked out but again trusted in the mighty Google, becasue as soon as i logged into my GMail it agev a message
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to log in while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.

Please try logging in to your account again in a few minutes.

I have seen “We’re experiencing problems”  messages many times before but this one said “your GMail account is experiencing error”, the next thought was did i do something strange today or did i violate some polocies or something or did someone try to hack into my account? After a while I just relaxed and thought may be its just the GMail team having some problem with the system and they even said “don’t worry” in the message Lets see how long it takes them to get the fault rectified as I don’t worry about my primary email account

If you are a Windows XP user and if you are required to change the extension of a file, then your chances of succeding are very low unless you have some tech knowledge

Extension is the 3 letter term used after the dot in a filename like .exe for executable files .txt for text files .doc for office documents .xls for spread sheets, it may sometimes be just two letters long like .pl for Perl language files. By default windows doesnot show you the extension of a file, only those files which it are not yet associated with any program are shown along with their extensions. Rest of the common file types dont have extensions displayed, when you try to change a file’s extension when its extension is not displayed you will just end up adding the new extension to the filename and not to the extension part of it, like you have a spreadsheet named accounts which is actually accounts.xls and you want to change it to a text file called accounts.txt when you just rename it you will end up renaming it to accounts.txt.xls where accounts.txt is the filename part and .xls is the extension part. So the solution for this is to make windows display the extensions of all files, to do this open Windows Explorer or commonly known as the My Computer and go to the Tools Menu (Alt + t) and then click Folder Options, in the dialog box change to the View tab and look for Hide extensions for known files and uncheck it and click OK.

Now all your files have extensions displayed along with filenames so when you want to change a file extension you can just change the 3 letter part after the . (dot) in the filename. One thing you should take note of is when you want to just change the filename make sure you dont alter the part after the . in the filename. You have to change only the part before the . to change the filename.

If you feel strange having all the files with those 3 letter extensions you can change it back to normal by checking the Hide extensions for known files option in the Folder Options dialog box.