Yes, it has changed a lot in the past few years, but it has only been around for four years and took time to mature. Deploying it has not been that difficult for a while now in a dedicated environment, and with Passenger (mod_rails) it is ridiculously simple even in a shared environment. Running Rails apps via CGI has not made sense for quite a while, even if you were using Fast CGI, Mongrel and a load balancing proxy have performed better and been easier to set up for quite some time.

Also, I'm not sure exactly what you mean about no debugging. ruby-debug works well, you can catch exceptions and do what you want with them, there are plenty of monitoring options, etc.

You can format it to be case-sensitive, just don't try and install Adobe Creative Suite 3, or you will sadly get this message.

put the camera in a fixed position with consistent lighting. figure out the pixel coord of the center of each dial. pick a fixed radius from that center point where there is minimal interference (there is either dial, or its that off white color). now just look at all the pixels in the circle around that point at that radius, and it should be easy to figure out if you're pixel is part of the dial or not. it is going to be sort of close to white #ffffff or sort of close to black #000000, either way, there will be an easy to detect dramatic difference. figure out the angular range that the dial covers (eg it covers from 61 deg to 66 deg) average that, and you have a fairly precise direction its pointing, then convert that to whatever scale the dial is using.

to make it easier you could run the image through some imagemagick filters (command line image processing) to reduce noise or simplify the colors.