we all google for errors

so hopefully this one will save a ruby/rails newbie some time. i upgraded to rails 2.3.2 and started seeing a weird error when trying to start the console:

...../rubygems/requirerment.rb:150:in 'parse':ArgumentError:Illformed requirement ["~> 1.1.pre"]
...../rubygems/requirerment.rb:150:in 'parse':ArgumentError:Illformed requirement ["~> 1.1.pre"]
...../vendor/rails/railties/lib/console_with_helpers.rb:5:NameError: uninitialized constant ApplicationController

at first, i thought it was because i hadn't renamed application.rb to application_controller.rb (which is what rails 2.3.x looks for). but what it really was is that i hadn't updated rubygems from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2.

to fix, all i needed to do was run:

gem update --system