brant interactive

iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 2
(tags: rails iphone mobile programming)

Having dealt with this lost connection issue more than a few times I thought I should write down the solution.
From the Mongrel FAQs:

Q: Mongrel stops working if it’s left alone for a long time.
If you find that Mongrel stops working after a long idle time
and you’re using MySQL then you’re hitting a bug in the [...]

(From William Morgan):

I do the vast majority of my hobby programming (and whatever amount of my professional programming that I can get away with) in Ruby. It is the perfect language for anyone who values elegance, beauty, flexibility, and power, while at the same time insists on a language that actually allows you to get [...]

So I was kindly issued a shiny new MacBook Pro which is truly awesome; an elegant gui built on top of Unix. I think this page pretty much covers it. I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for the past 6 months or so, and I can ‘t say I’m sad to close that chapter. [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve gotten the ‘MySQL lost connection’ errors when running rails apps on Ubunutu. And if you’ve tried to apply the common fix - installing the mysql gem - you might not have been able to and have seen an error such as:
ERROR: While executing gem … (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)
ERROR: Failed to build [...]