Solution: webrat's save_and_open_page and open_error_files are not opening the browser automatically

If you are using webrat's features like save_and_open_page or config.open_error_files and is not automatically opening your browser then you might need to install launchy, It fails silently, I know, it should be more informative:

sudo gem install launchy

More info about launchy: http://rubygems.org/gems/launchy/

Passing parameters to before_filter methods in Rails

If you have methods in your controller class that requires parameters you can still user them as filters.

Example:

def require_role(role)

#do some stuff with 'role' parameter

end

We can use it like this:

before_filter do |controller_instance|

controller_instance.require_role :admin

end

In fact, you can still use :only and :except if you need it, example:

before_filter :only => :index do |controller_instance|

controller_instance.require_role :admin

end

Have a nice day.

Installing Mono 2.6 (or the latests version) on Ubuntu 10.4(or the latest version)

This is a quick guide to install the latest mono runtime in your existing Ubuntu:

First of all:

• I'm not an expert installing Mono from Sources, so this is all at your own risk.
• Don't remove your existing Mono Runtine, you still need it.
• I recommend you to keep your existing Mono Runtime(the one you installed via APT) side by side with the version that you are going to configure.

Here we go:

1.a using synaptic or aptitude, install the following packages:

• autotools-dev
• autoconf
• libtool
• bison
• gettext

2. Download the Stable version right here:

http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources-stable/ (is the first one from the first group, currently the name is mono-2.6.4.tar.bz2)

3. Read the instructions right from the Mono wiki(but don't execute them yet):

http://www.mono-project.com/Compiling_Mono_From_Tarball

Note: You may want to install into a different location and not '/usr/local' in order to avoid conflict with your existing Ubuntu Mono installation, so I would recommend you to use '$HOME/mono/local' or something, just like this:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/mono/local;

4. Now you can follow the instructions.

Feel free leave a comment if you find any errors.