Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

I had long planned the move from the .NET-based DasBlog blogging engine to Wordpress but just couldn’t seem to make the time to complete the move. I finally pulled the trigger and cutover to Wordpress a couple of weeks ago. The process was not nearly as painful as I imagined and I’m now beginning to reap the rewards of working on a blogging platform that’s more broadly integrated into the Web ecosystem. This blog entry is a collection of the key technical takeaways from my migration. Hopefully they will be helpful for other people looking to migrate to Wordpress, especially on the Microsoft IIS platform.

• Getting Wordpress Up and Running on IIS is Very Easy – I was surprised how easy it was to get Wordpress running on IIS 7. The entire process took me no longer than 30 minutes to complete once I had the correct guidance in place. The items that were of the utmost help to me here were as follows:
• Webpage – Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0 – A great introductory background and overview document on FastCGI on IIS 7. A good first read but shouldn’t be used as an installation guide.
• Screencast – Installing PHP on Windows Server 2008 – First in a three part series that will get you up and running with WordPress on IIS7.
• Screencast – Installing MySQL on Windows Server 2008 – Second in a three part series of screencasts covering the installation and initial database creation under MySQL.
• Screencast – Installing Wordpress on IIS 7 – The third and final screencast should bring you home with the installation. If you install the newest version of PHP / WP, several of the IIS settings covered at the end of this screen cast will have already been made for you. Just ignore them.

• There’s Help Porting Content Into Wordpress From Other Blog Engines – This was very welcome news as porting everything by hand would have been intolerably tedious. Porting blog content is a two step process:
  • Das Blog to BlogML Converter – Converts DasBlog source XML into standard BlogML file that can be imported into WordPress.
  • WordPress Import Module – The import module covered at the bottom of this post allows you to import BlogML into WordPress.

• Don’t Forget About Mapping the URLs of Your Entries so That All Your Links Don’t Break – Maintaining external consistency is critical to followers of your blog. They care little that you migrated onto new software. Google cares even less. Don’t make people think about this. Do the work for them and map your legacy URLs to the new URLs in WordPress so that the change is transparent to everyone but you. Most of the guidance I could find on the web around mapping WordPress URLs dealt with Apache mod_rewrite. Fortunately IIS 7 provides an extension called “URL Rewrite” that can rewrite incoming URL requests. This article and the links within provide you everything that you need to understand URL Rewrite and get the job done.

• Take The Opportunity To Leverage the Cloud – Although the text ports fairly well using BlogML as a bridge, the other binary content (images, document, etc.) need to be moved over manually. You can just copy the DasBlog contents folder over to maintain URL continuity or you can get a bit more ambitious. I chose to leverage Amazon’s S3 file storage service to store all of my binary content so that I don’t have to worry about backing it up or moving it ever again. I took the opportunity to set up S3 virtual hosting so that, with a bit of DNS trickery, my blog binary contents are all served from http://s3.beckshome.com.

• Identify and Engage the Necessary Wordpress Widgets – One of the key features of the Wordpress blogging engine is its extensibility and the vast array of freely available themes and plugins that you can use to add valuable functionality to your blog. A top 10 or 20 list of plugins would warrant another post entirely and there are a multitude of these lists already out there. Instead, I’ll recommend a series of plugins that I found to be absolutely necessary to replace content or functions I had available under DasBlog and which I considered “table stakes” for the move over to Wordpress.
• Flickr Badge Widget – I replaced separate DasBlog pages for my photos and videos with a single Flickr Flash Badge that links to my Flickr account.
• Kimli Flash Embed – I have a screencast I did on Microsoft Virtual Earth a while back. This was the only way to embed it into the main Wordpress page.
• SyntaxHighlighter Evolved – I have a bunch of source code snippets embedded in my blog entries, mostly C# and Ruby. This plugin made them look better than they ever did on my older blog with zero fuss.
• WP Google Analytics – Despite the avialbility of Wordpress stats, I’m sticking with Google analytics. This plugin made the transition seamless.

Since jumping back on the blogging bandwagon, I’ve been looking to get more familiar with the top social networking sites. I’ve had some experiences with most of the major players except Twitter, which I never did manage to get into. I decided to give Twitter a fair chance and see if it worked for me. In order to do this, I felt some basic background / guidance was necessary before jumping in heads-first. Turns out that The Twitter Book from Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein was really all that I needed. My Amazon review follows:

Think of The Twitter Book not as a book but rather like a longer, really well done, Powerpoint presentation. For the most part, the top of every other page of the book has a really clear storyboard message which is explained on the subsequent two pages with creative examples, both textual and using simple, colorful graphics. As countless reviewers have already pointed out, it’s a case of the book medium emulating the tool it’s describing – terse and colorful.

The book is an easy read in an hour, give or take 10 minutes. It also functions well as a reference document if you need to go back and look up Twitter features, such as hashtags and retweets, as you gain more familiarity with the Twitter service. At 231 not-so-dense pages, the book is rightsized for a service that enforces a 140 character message limit.

If you’ve looked at Twitter before and didn’t get what all the fuss was about, give it another shot after reading this book. Try the “Three Weeks or Your Money Back – Guaranteed” plan in chapter 1. You’ve got lots to gain and very little to lose.

A review long overdue for a Jolt Award winner and one of the best architecture books on my bookshelf, Release-It!

I’ve recommended this book to many colleagues of mine and haven’t heard a disappointing review to date. I’ve heard the terms ‘pessimistic’ and ‘realistic’ used with equal frequency to describe this book. Having just completed my second reading, I can affirm that these terms are both representative take-aways. Nygard openly admits to being more than a bit paranoid about the way he approaches enterprise application architecture. Although this may seem alarming to many new to the IT field, those of us who have been around for a while recognize this as a necessary, at times life saving, defense mechanism.

Despite the presence of patterns, this is not really a pattern book that can be read piecemeal. It’s best read and enjoyed end-to-end. The books serves to teach us old dogs some new tricks as well as serving as a way to say “welcome to the field of enterprise application architecture” to team members new to this role.

Book Strengths

• Real world production incidents, just in case you think: (a) you’re the only one who ever gets into such situations; or (b) such things don’t happen in the real world with large enterprise applications (where do you work?)
• The patterns. Even though there’s no sample code, the real value is in describing and cataloging these patterns.

Book Weaknesses

• Organizational inconsistency. Two sections of the book (Stability and Capacity) follow the anti-pattern / pattern approach while the other sections of the book (General System Design and Operations) follow more of a narrative approach.

Yeah, the book focuses almost entirely on Java-based systems but almost all of the book has direct applicability to other enterprise technologies. In the last chapter of the book, Adaptation, Nygard’s writing style tends to wander a bit and deviate towards a rant. However, it’s hard to fault him for this, especially when he states things so eloquently:

Real enterprises are always messier than the enterprise architecture would ever admit. New technologies never quite fully supplant old ones. A mishmash of integration technologies will be found, from flat-file transfer with batch processing to publish/subscribe messaging. Any strategy formulated predicated on creating a monoculture—whether it is a single integration technology or a single programming language—is doomed to be a costly failure.

After more than a year-long hiatus, this entry marks my return to blogging. One of the things I decided to do to get myself back into the spirit of blogging was to change my blogging engine. I made the move from the .NET-based DasBlog to the more mainstream WordPress platform. I will be providing more information about the migration process (specifically, WordPress on IIS 7), helpful tools and tutorials, and useful WordPress plugins in an upcoming blog post.

Knowing very little about how WordPress worked beforehand, I needed a book to jumpstart my involvement with the tool. After a bit of research, I settled on WordPress for Business Bloggers. This book, along with some basic Web-based tutorials on installing WordPress on IIS were all I needed to get myself up to speed. My detailed Amazon.com review of the book can be found below.

Touted as a ‘beyond the basics’ book targeted towards business bloggers, WordPress for Business Bloggers delivers a wealth of WordPress and blogging knowledge in the context of a fictitious case study. I picked up this book as a way to jumpstart my involvement with WordPress after several years of involvement with other blogging tools. I was not at all disappointed with the results.

Based upon my experiences, I can confidently assert that no experience with WordPress is necessary to benefit from this book. The book states the assumption of such knowledge up front and, after that, never returns to WordPress basics. Ample materials on WordPress installation, operations and configuration can be found online and I appreciate that the book didn’t spend any time rehashing these items.

Instead of focusing on simpler procedural activities, the book weaves together the challenges of solving business issues for Chiliguru, a fictitious business blog, with advanced WordPress operations, guidance, and plugins. The book manages to bridge the challenges of running a day-to-day blog with WordPress-specific knowledge in a unique style. One would be hard pressed to cobble together the information and knowledge this book imparts from the web-based tutorials currently available on the Internet. Examples of the unique content covered in this book include:

• Search engine optimization, including coverage of keywords, permalinks, and sitemaps supported by a variety of WordPress plugins
• Integrating social networking content from Twitter and Facebook into WordPress blogs
• Blog statistics analysis with both WordPress stats and Google Analytics
• Integration of Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliate programs into WordPress-based blogs
• Coverage of advanced technical topics including: increasing scalability via WP Super Cache, using WordPress MU for multi-blog environments, and backing-up, restoring and moving WordPress blogs.

If you’re looking for a beginners guide to WordPress, this book is not for you. On the other hand, if you’ve accumulated some basic experience with WordPress or another blogging engine and you’re looking for insight and knowledge to take your WordPress blog to the next level, you really can’t go wrong with this book.

I had to really lay into this movie in my Amazon.com review. I tend to write reviews for products that I’m impressed with and just keep quite on products that don’t really impress. This movie, however, was the exception. It got such good reviews on Amazon that I felt compelled to give it a look. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) had some of the best information on this flick outside of Amazon. It didn’t make the mainstream movie reviews sites like Rottentomatoes.com since it never made it to the box office. 2 stars was probably a bit harsh, 2.5 would have been more appropriate. I felt the genuine need to remove this movie from the 5 star plateau though as this is genuinely deceitful. My Amazon review follows:

I really live or die by Amazon reviews. 99% of the time, they are spot on. I felt like I was burned a bit by the reviews on this one.

I should have been a bit suspicious when a movie that never even made it to the box office (mainstream, independent, or otherwise) was holding down a 5 star rating on Amazon. Some of the sites that I normally rely on for movie ratings didn’t even cover this movie since it didn’t get a lot of press and didn’t get any reviews by national or regional critics.

The majority of reviews that I read seemed held back on information so as not to give the “plot turns” away. Let me lay it out for you, there are no real plot turns so don’t hold your breath waiting for any. Once you get past the opening scenes and understand the premise of the film, it quickly degrades into a typical Hollywood action / adventure type flick. That said, this is no worse than a lot of the trash that Hollywood releases to fill the theaters during the peak summer movie months. In some cases (pick most any action film on installment 3 or greater), it’s actually better.

“Already Dead” is a 2-3 star movie that might be worth the low price you pay for the rental at Unboxed or your local retail outlet. Don’t go in expecting too much though. There’s a reason this didn’t get picked up for mainstream distribution.

Having non-static machine keys when hosting on IIS is just one of those things that’s just bound to cause trouble eventually. This holds true equally for single server hosting environments and load balanced web farm environments. Especially if your goal is to shield your users from any knowledge of IIS lifecycle activities (e.g. application pool recycles), the use of static machine keys is to be strongly recommended. The implications of static versus dynamic keys are enumerated for several different hosting situations below:

• Single Machine – Most of the recommendations around machine keys involve synchronizing machine keys across multiple machines. There is, however, value in setting static machine keys for a single machine, single worker process environment. Quite simply, if machine keys are not static, the generation of a dynamic machine key for an IIS reboot or application pool recycle will cause any machine key related elements (e.g. view state) rendered before the event to be invalid. This will likely result in exceptions that will impact normal user processing.

• Single Machine / Web Garden – The introduction of the Web Garden option to IIS can be viewed as the “poor man’s load balancing”. This option provides for a simple round robin routing across multiple worker processes, usually with each process owing affinity to a particular processor. Due to the simple load balancing approach taken, there is no option for web gardens but to synchronize machine keys. This is of course, unless you’ve managed to make your application completely stateless, in which case (congratulations) none of this advice applies to you.

• Multiple Machines / Web Farms – The applicability of static machine keys to a web farm environment applies, theoretically, only to web gardens in which the load balancing approach does not guarantee server affinity. Once again, to avoid impacting user processing during load balance machine failover or due to recycles or reboots, I’d always recommend using static machine keys. Even when these areas are not concerns, I’ve found other troubles just seem to arise when you can’t guarantee static machine keys across machines. For web events regarding cryptographic exceptions or viewstate verification issues, I’ve found it best to start troubleshooting with synchronizing machine keys and then working down from there.

The definitive guide to configuring machine keys in ASP.NET 2.0, including .NET code for generating the keys, can be found here. Microsoft has never revisited their ruling that machine key issues can arise outside of web farms. Once again, if you’re observing cryptographic or viewstate errors, I’d advise that you start with static machine keys. If compiling and running Microsoft’s code to generate a machine key is asking too much, this online program will generate a key for you.

Finally, I’ve been asked a couple of times about the downsides of sharing static machine keys across machines. This depends upon what you use the machine key for. In most cases, I wouldn’t advise that you use the machine key for anything more than viewstate encoding. In this case, a machine key compromise will mean that someone can theoretically hack your viewstate. If they got your machine key, it also means that they have access to your web.config file, in which case you usually have bigger concerns than viewstate hacking.

I’ve been contemplating the move towards a self-hosted Subversion repository for quite a while. My earlier attempts worked but left me with a lot of inconvenient and sometimes quirky side effects. These experiences always led me back to hosting Subversion on Linux, which is really where it works most naturally. Recently, however, I decided to retry my luck with Subversion hosting on Windows and I made the call to go with a “package” instead of doing the Apache / Subversion integration myself.

The tool that I went with, VisualSVN, is a Windows version of Subversion that targets primarily Microsoft developers using VisualStudio as their development platform. Matter of fact, the Subversion server package is freely distributed and the actual product that is sold is the Visual Studio plugin that allows you to tap into Subversion from Visual Studio. With a 30 day trial period and $49 price tag, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to try it out. My findings are below:

• VisualSVN Server – The VisualSVN server, as mentioned earlier is a freely distributed product. You can get this piece of software whether or not you ultimately decide to buy and use the Subversion Visual Studio plugin. The server runs exclusively over HTTP / HTTPS (using OpenSSL) and does not support Subversion’s binary protocol or running Subversion over SSH. Obviously, this means that Apache is in play. A version of Apache is included in the distribution. Initial configuration of the server is very easy, the setup instructions describe the extent of it. As I blogged about previously, this changes a bit if you try to get Apache and IIS to run side-by-side. In this case, you need to be very explicit and tell the very greedy IIS to stop listening on other IP addresses so that port 80 can be shared by IIS and Apache. I included links to the Microsoft article in my earlier post. In this case, you’ll want to use httpcfg delete iplisten -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to stop IIS from listening on the port Apache is running on.

The folks who designed VisualSVN added some cool management functionality that shields the administrator from lower level Subversion commands. Implemented as a Windows MMC snap-in, Subversion repository administration be performed right alongside other server management tasks. The MMC enables one step creation of repositories (with or without the standard Subversion folder structure), creation of users and groups, and assignment of user privileges to repository actions.

• VisualSVN Visual Studio Plugin – As useful as the server is, the real product is the VisualStudio plugin. The most recent version of this plugin works on VisualStudio 2008 so I thought I’d install it and give it a whirl. Installation is fairly easy. Both TortoiseSVN and the VisualSVN plugin must be installed. I don’t know exactly how VisualSVN communicates with Tortoise but it seems to make sense to leverage an existing Windows Subversion library rather than building everything from scratch. Using both the plugin and Tortoise gives you two ways to work with Subversion. In my experience with other Java IDE plugins (Netbeans and Elcipse), this is sometimes necessary to get around the shortcomings of the browser plugin.

Adding a project to VisualSVN using the plugin is, as it well should be, a relatively easy task. VisualSVN has some intelligence built in above and beyond the basicTortoiseSVN libraries. In my case, the plugin didn’t add my Visual Studio settings, binaries, or a bunch of MP3 and JPEG photos that represent content and really didn’t belong under source control. Other than that, a lot of the processing is just handed over to TortoiseSVN. The SVN UI presented by the plugin should all be pretty familiar to you if you’ve ever used TortoiseSVN before.

This looks to be my keeper for Subversion hosting. Now I need to port over my existing repositories into the VisualSVN server.

I’ve been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it’s also been performing very well and runs so silent that I’m hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn’t aware of before. This doesn’t mean that I’ve completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple’s site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.

I’m running 3 operating systems now on this machine, 2 of them under Fusion 1.1. Mac OS X Leopard came pre-installed with the machine and Vista and Ubuntu Linux are running under Fusion. Despite the 64-bit Intel architecture on the new Macs, both the Vista and Ubuntu installs are 32-bit. I didn’t hear enough good news about the 64 bit releases to convince me that they were worth pursuing. All of this is running on 4GB of memory. Only 1 GB was stock and you’d be crazy to pay Apple’s prices for memory. Other World Computing (OWC) will get you to the 4GB maximum for less than $100. The memory install took all of about 10 minutes and OWC’s service and delivery were nothing short of outstanding.

As far as the individual operating systems, they are all running fine. That said, everyone puts different kinds of stresses on their machines. Mine is software development and I require each of my operating systems to run at least oneIDE. That’s actually the reason for the existence of these VMs in the first place. Although my initial research prepared me for the worst, I’ve had no issues with running IDEs concurrently on all 3 operating systems. I’ve encountered some small quirks, which I’ve documented below for anyone who might find this sort of thing useful:

• Mac OS X Leopard – I’m running NetBeans 6.0 with the Ruby-only configuration. Much to the chagrin of many Mac developers, Leopard did not ship with Java 6 even though it was included in some of thepre-releases. This proved to be a non-issue for the installation of the latest version of NetBeans. Obviously, running NetBeans in Ruby-only mode means that I’m not exercising the JDK and thus avoiding what could potentially be a lot of issues.
• Windows Vista – Although I’ve had issues getting used to the Vista operating system from the Windows 2003 Server / Windows XP I’ve become so familiar with, I’ve had few issues actually running Vista. I’m running Vista with the 1 GB RAM that Fusion recommended and have had no issues thus far. The only issue I encountered was trying to install Vista in Fusion Easy Install mode with multipleCDs , as opposed to a DVD. This is a documented issue with Fusion that I didn’t become aware of until I ran into it head-on. Simply switching to a normal install solved all of my issues. On top of Vista, I’m running Visual Studio 2008. This runs pretty quick – even on 1 GB and builds of moderately sized solutions are pretty fast. TheIDE is really responsive and you really only notice that your running in a virtualized environment if you try to resize the entire Vista window to get more real estate for the IDE.
• Ubuntu 7.10 – Despite the size of the operating system, this installation took longer than Vista. I chose not to use one of VMware’s canned virtual appliances and go with a fresh install. I would probably re-examine this decision if I had the chance to do it all over again. Ubuntu is running NetBeans 6.0 with the full Java EE stack. The install of NetBeans downloaded directly from netbeans.com went really well once the proper Sun JDKs were installed. Both the Java 5 and Java 6 JDKs were available directly from Ubuntu’s installation utility. I installed Java 5 first and, after realizing that it was a vanilla 1.5.0 release that didn’t meet the requirements for NetBeans 6.0, I installed Java 6. Things have been just dandy since then.

After a long hiatus, I just got done working my way through a 6 month photo backlog, arranging and backing up photos and picking the best ones out for uploading to Flickr. You can find the new photos in the photo section of my blog. I was working my way through videos as well and preparing to convert some of these to Flash for uploading. If you look at the videos section of my blog, you’ll notice that there are no new videos. So what happened?

Although I’m really happy with On2 Technologies Flash encoding software, the process of importing and transcoding video is time consuming and CPU intensive. Then there’s the entire upload and markup creation process, which is a royal pain that I should have long since automated away – but I haven’t. What I’d really like is a process similar to the one that I have with Flickr: I upload photos using a OS-specific program (uploadr) and they just appear on my blog. I’ve known that this process needs to be replaced for a while, I’ve just been hesitant to pull the trigger. Enter Smugmug…

Smugmug, the family owned photo service that leans heavily on Amazon’s S3 service for file storage, announced last week a significant upgrade to their video hosting capabilities by supporting the H.264 video format. Right now, Apple’s QuickTime plugin provides the best support for H.264 but Adobe’s newest version of Flash will also be supporting H.264. If Microsoft wants to remain competitive with Silverlight, they’ll be following suit as well. So what does this mean? This means that Smugmug will automatically transcode your uploaded video. Depending upon your membership level, video can be encoded at DVD resolution (960×540, for power users) or HD (1280×720, for pro users). You upload it and Smugmug transcodes and hosts it, providing unlimited bandwidth and storage space. Since seeing is believing, click on the image below to see a sample SmugMug Thanksgiving video and tell me you wouldn’t like to have online video of this quality.

If you’re going video, you’ve got to go big and at $150/year, Smugmug carries with it a fairly large price tag. However, when I factor in that I can cancel my Flickr subscription, stop upgrading my Flash encoder, decrease my bandwidth utilization on my hosting service, and have a hassle free upload and transcode experience… in HD, I’m sold. As an added bonus, Smugmug has just added an adaptive imaging sizing capability they call “SmugMungous” that automatically selects the right size picture for your screen. To get the full effect, this needs to be tried on a fairly large monitor. And by the way, you can point to your smugmug gallery using a custom domain or sub-domain and you can share video updates as an iTunes Podcast that friends and family can subscribe to.

SmugMug is just one more piece in my grand attempt to upgrade my life to HD. We went with HD TV almost 3 years ago now and it’s hard looking at a normal signal now, especially on a large 16:9 screen. I’m strongly considering Smugmug for its HD capabilities but this is going to cause me to reexamine two other areas of my life that need HD upgrading: my HD recording capability and HD playback capability. I’m waiting for Santa Claus to drop an HD TiVo down the chimney. The $1000 dollar price tag for the original Series3 TiVo was a pill I couldn’t bring myself to swallow, no matter how much I love TiVo. AT $300 and almost all of the features of the Series3, the HD TiVo got my attention. I’m also looking at an HD camcorder, an essential item if I’m serious about the Smugmug thing.

That’s a lot of upgrading to do. Still, there are several areas that I’m not upgrading. I’m waiting for the Blu-ray / HD DVD war to show some signs of abating but this is definitely a medium worth revisiting in 2008. HD Radio – now I just don’t get this one!

Another in the installment of Rails on Windows “gotchas”, there are some things to be wary of when working with the Simple_Captcha plugin in the Windows environment. In terms of basic background, the Simple_Captcha plugin facilitates the integration of CAPTCHA (Computer Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) image recognition tests, like the example below, into a Rails application. Facilitates is perhaps not a strong enough term. The plugin makes CAPTCHA integration dirt simple.

The Simple_Captcha plugin uses RMagick for generation of the CAPTCHA recognition images, allowing for various image styles and distortion levels. The CAPTCHA can be integrated via the controller (this one is dirt simple) or via the model (this one is just silly simple). You can find out more about these and various other integration options on the plugin’s page.

If you’re doing Rails development on the Windows platform and are not feeling especially masochistic, the rmagick-win32 gem, which is bundled with a copy of the ImageMagick Windows installer, is really the only way to use RMagick. For a long while, the 1.13.0 rmagick-win32 gem was the standard. However, this gem is likely to cause you issues and you should really upgrade your gem to the 1.14.1 gem or greater. These gems are fixed to work with RubyGems 0.9.4, which is the most recent version of this gem as of this blog post. If you don’t perform this update, you’re likely to see ImageMagick issues bubble up at runtime.

On Windows, these runtime errors frequently manifest themselves as ‘cur_image’ issues. Several of these issues have been reported on the plugin’s page. My post on 10/6 covered fixing these issues by upgrading your RMagick gem. Please don’t downgrade other gems, as suggested in some other posts; this will only make your life more miserable in the future.

All-in-all, the RMagick Windows gem is an excellent way to make powerful image processing capabilities available to all, including those unfortunate enough to be stuck on a Rails on Windows development platform. The plugins built on top of RMagick such as Simple_Captcha and Attachment_Fu are incredibly powerful and remain very simple by leveraging RMagick’s capabilities. Just beware if you’re developing on Windows, a little bit of tweaking and debugging may be necessary to get these plugins to work as advertised.