Recently I've been working on a large-ish project where all of the UI is written in Javascript. That, in itself, is great. The environments (the browsers) are crappy crappy for development though. Sure, there are Firefox extensions etc etc to help, but it's Just Not Great. Javascript = Great. Ajax = Yay. Browsers = Bah.

Over the weekend I spent all sorts of time getting a simple Rails application running with Apache and mod_fcgid. When I gave up and tried making it work with lighttpd I got server error galore. Yay. What was wrong? My fastcgi? The fcgi Ruby extension? My ruby installation is in /pkg/packages/ruby-1.8.4 or some such and the gem tool couldn't find its own libraries after being installed there. Maybe something similar for something else? I have no idea, I got no error messages anywhere. Ruby = Great. Rails = Very nice[1]. Ruby Gems = It sure is no CPAN.pm. FastCGI/lighttpd/etc = Loosely coupled? No mister, you have some way to …