To briskly continue my regular series of cooking blog posts (previous post March 1st 2005) I present the vegetable dopiaza. I made one last night and it was yum, though I do admit to having been overly generous with all the spices – which I like but Louisa doesn’t.
Taken back in 2005 actually, but rediscovered after showing up on my random slideshow.
Oh, btw, I’m doing a talk tomorrow at the North West Ruby User Group in Manchester about how we do the Ruby on Rails hosting at Brightbox.
I’ll be talking about SANs, Centos, Ubuntu, Xen, Apache, Lighty, NGINX, MySQL and other goodies. Heck, I might even mention Ruby, which would be nice considering it’s a Ruby user group.
My business partner Jeremy will be nattering about the business side and various other things.
Update: A couple of photos here and here.
Rubinius has support (as of today!) for running multiple instances of it’s VM within one process, each VM on it’s own *native* thread, each VM running many ruby green threads. Each VM has it’s own heap and so each VM could load different apps that wouldn’t interfere with each other. We have plans for a mod_rubinius for apache that takes full advantage of this feature. Stay tuned ;)
– Ezra Zygmuntowi on a comment on Ruby Inside.
Very interesting stuff. Why bother making Rails thread safe when you have an awesome Ruby VM such as Rubinius. I’d like to see Mongrel (or FastCGI! Bring back FastCGI!) make use of this somehow, running multiple Rails instances itself in one process and distributing requests between them. Interested in knowing how it’d deal with memory leaks in external libraries though (like rmagick suffers from).
Still, you lose finer grained access to most of the nice UNIX process management stuff though then, like limiting memory usage with ulimits, but nobody seems to be using that for Ruby deployment anyway. It’s all fiddling around with Monit and such instead (why always with the steps backward!).
Of all the photos I took in 2007, these are some of my favourites.
My News Sniffer project needs to regularly do some back-end stuff like checking a bunch of rss feeds and downloading web pages. I do this with some rake tasks, which I call using the cron daemon. Recently I’ve been having problems where some tasks take a bit longer than usual to complete and end up running in parallel. This slows things down, which means more tasks end up running in parallel and then my little virtual machine eventually falls on it’s face under memory pressure.
I could implement some locking in my application, but it’s always good to avoid as much new code as possible so, in the good old *NIX fashion, I cobbled together a short bash script taking advantage of existing tools. What this does is executes the given rake task in the given rails root using the Debian/Ubuntu tool start-stop-daemon (provided by the dpkg package, which is therefore always installed). start-stop-daemon uses a pid file to keep track of the rake program for the given task, so it will never run a second concurrent instance of rake for this task. Cron just keeps trying to run it every 5 minutes or whatever, but it only runs once concurrently.
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The Open Rights Group (UK’s equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is two years old today. They fight for our digital civil rights (shoddy electronic voting schemes, software patents, all that kind of stuff) and are very good at it from what I’ve heard and seen. Go read all about them and please consider supporting them, if you haven’t already.
Ugh. I just did a search on streetmap.co.uk for a latitude and longitude reference and it didn’t recognise it. I spotted the radio button to tell it what kind of search I’m doing and clicked again. Still no luck. Removing the comma between the two numbers got me what I wanted.
It is not difficult to detect when someone is searching for a latitude and longitude. It is a pair of floating point numbers with 13 decimal places. Who lives on a street named with 13 decimal places? How many businesses are named with just numbers such that I would require 13 decimal places to tell them apart?
And then, after the user goes out of their way to tell your software what to expect, why not accept a few variations of the input (though one lousy comma would hardly count as a variation to me).
I’d be better off with a pencil sketch map and a divining rod. No wonder these services are losing all their business to services like Google maps.
I’ve just tried out the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment. It appears to be named Eclipse due to how it consumes all your CPU and RAM, overshadowing anything else you might want to do.
I tried the RadRails addon thing out for developing Rails. It has some nice features but is rather a big jump from vim, which I’ve been using up until now. And to the best of my memory, vim has never crashed once. Whereas Eclipse has already crashed about 10 times in 24 hours.
UPDATE: I used Eclipse for all my Ruby on Rails development for almost two weeks but I’ve now given up. Even with leaky old Firefox and the monolith that is OpenOffice running concurrently I would rarely notice swapping, but Eclipse has decimated my swap partition. It’s resource requirements (mostly RAM) have turned my brand new laptop into a 486 DX66 with 4MB RAM and a broken CPU fan. It would regularly crash too. Any time saving it’s features might have offered were well cancelled out by all the lost work.
I am using the Aptana Ruby on Rails Eclipse addons, so maybe you can blame that, though the Haskell addons were misbehaving too. Ridiculous stuff.
I’m just going to learn how to use some of the more advanced features of VIM. I’m giving GVIM a go too. Oh VIM, how I missed you so.
My sister has just launched her online baby shop Mia Bambina. Named after her own baby, Mia. You can’t buy babies at it, but you can buy organic and fair trade baby clothes and toys and stuff.
Mia bambina is your one stop shop for organic and fair trade products for babies aged 0 to 12 months (occasionally 12 months+!).
All our products are either organic and/or fair trade and our aim is to make ethical shopping for little ones easy and fun.
We have carefully selected the best quality organic and fair trade clothes, washable nappies, baby skincare products and toys – and put them all in one place to make shopping a breeze.
My old passport expired last year – I’m hoping the rfid crap will be nixed before I have to get a new one (unlikely I know). But anyway, I doubt I would have got very far with my old passport photo anyway. I happen to have been wearing my band’s t-shirt at the time of the photo and my band’s name is clearly in shot.
I’m not sure a post “911” USA would have accepted me with the words “NERV GAS” written on my passport. A pre “911” USA seemed fine with it when I went to Las Vegas for Defcon in 2000, but THE WORLD IS A DIFFERENT PLACE NOW as you might regularly have been told by people whose job it is to know about these things.
