Every year, a bunch of us chip in for two small scholarships for the graduating class of the high school in Salonta, Romania. The job would be a lot easier if we had a suitable website. It would say a little about the reasons for this enterprise, explain the application terms, and then serve as an interface between the applicants and the selection committee. It should have an online application form linked to an applicant database and to a tree of personal folders where only applicants themselves and the selection committee have access. These folders would hold application materials -- essays, transcripts, what have you.

I volunteered to build this myself, based on some brief PHP experience I had accummulated in the process of building the first, non-WordPress version of this site. I guess now I'll have to, unless I find something both free and right for the job sometime soon.

This looks like a good excuse to dabble in Ruby on Rails. That, in turn, brought me to back to Cygwin, which I installed a while ago. I used it to debug and compile C++ code, and didn't pay much mind to any of the other things you can do with it. Cygwin comes with Ruby, it turns out. I updated it based on instructions here just to make sure that I had the latest version, and I was good to go:


$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 72) [i386-cygwin]

Rails is another matter. I had to install it separately. With help from here, the effort was trivial and seems to have worked:


$ rails .
exists
create app/controllers
create app/helpers
create app/models
[snip]

Why Rails? Because according to its creator, Rails is so great that it's probably easier to learn Ruby in order to use it, than it would be to learn another framework in some language you already know. The full citation is here. Well, I hope it's true. I'll keep a running progress report.

Example of usage: to get SSH access to my server, I normally use PuTTY. But after I installed the OpenSSH Cygwin package, I could just do this from the Cygwin command line:

~ ssh my_server_username@my_server.homeip.net

For that to work, I had to set up a .ssh directory in my Cygwin user folder, namely C:\cygwin\home\my_Windows_username\. But you can't set up directory names that start with a dot in Windows XP. Instead, you can set up the \home\my_Windows_username part, and then from the Cygwin window, you just do this:

~ mkdir /home/my_Windows_username/.ssh

Of course Cygwin, like UNIX and unlike Windows, is case-sensitive. I copied my id_dsa private key from the USB stick here, and I was in business. As soon as the server recognized my key, Cygwin created a known_hosts file as well. So far, very UNIX-like. Took me a while, though, to figure out how Cygwin emulated the UNIX directory structure. Google took me here, and then all was well.