For more info and installation instructions, you should take a look at the plugin’s GitHub page: http://github.com/frane/rating_for

By the way: Since we’re currently on the edge between Rails 2.3 and 3.0, I’m happy to announce that the rating_for plugin is compatible with both versions.

Any kind of feedback is welcome and if you’ve got questions, just ask!

However, there was a problem with the emails, which a user automatically received from the web-site. I used a cron-job with Rails’ “script/runner” to periodically send mails from a model like this:

The mail template was translated with the Rails I18n API like this:

The problem was only that the mails were sent out in English because the web-sites default language (I18n.default_locale) was English and there was no “I18n.locale” set in “script/runner”. The easiest solution to that problem is to set the locale somewhere in your email setup:

Alternatively, it’s possible to set the language in the email template:

It’s more a logical then a technical problem, but it shows how (logically) complicated multi-language web-sites can be.

Usually, you connect to a Windows server using Microsoft’s “Remote Desktop Connection” (RDC) client. If you’re not running a terminal server, the number of allowed sessions on the server is limited to two sessions at a time.

Unfortunately a session isn’t ended and closed if you close your RDC client window, but only if you log off, i.e. by clicking on “Start” -> “Log Off”. So if you just close your RDC window without to log yourself really off, there’s a good chance that you lock yourself out from the server and thus get the following message “Terminal Server Has Exceeded the Maximum Number of Allowed Connections”.

If you have access to your server, you can easily log on to the server on-site and remove all “dead” sessions, but if your server is somewhere on this planet where you can’t just go over to, you should be served by using the following command:

This command gives you access to a special session, namely the session 0 and you should be able to log in as “Administrator” and remove the dead sessions.

This two sessions at a time restriction is really annoying and it gets even more annoying if other people also use the server and don’t log off correctly. Having such stupid problems is probably one reason why many people get mad a Microsoft and their products. It’s simply a licensing issue you don’t have on Linux and *BSD systems .

Step 1: Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list. Replace every occurrence of “etch” (I assume you’re updating from Debian “Etch”) with “lenny”. Your sources.list should now be looking roughly like that:

Step 2: Simply run apt-get updateand you should probably get something like this:

Apparently, this means you need to get the public key for 4D270D06F42584E6. This can easily be done with the following commands.

Please note that the key ID and though the public key needed on your system can differ from this one.

Step 3 Finally, you can rerun the package-list update and run the actual upgrade.

Depending on your machine’s capacity and your internet connection speed the upgrade can take from about 15 minutes to some hours. The avarege time my updates took was 30 minutes. After that you can reboot your freshly upgraded system with the new kernel and you’re done.

At this point you can be as creative as you want with reading the user name and password form a file or database and checking hashed passwords instead of plain text. For my purposes this was just enough, so I didn’t waste any more time on it. At the end of this post be warned: Basic Authentication through Rails does only protect your application, but it does not protect the static content in your public directory.