Ninjamurai

Antonio Cangiano has posted some great benchmarks for Ruby incorporating all the big implementations of the language (e.g. IronRuby, 1.9, jRuby).

It is interesting to note that since Microsoft is focusing on fixing compatibility in IronRuby and not working on speed it is WAY, WAY slower than dirt. In fact, Ruby on Windows is just slow period and on Vista it is like a turtle.

I am not sure why this is other than work on Windows versions of things in the open source community is not taken as, ahem, seriously as it is on Mac OS X or Linux. It is probably a cultural thing.

Another point of interest is how well jRuby did in these marks. Holy shamoly that’s some hot preformance from the Java based Ruby engine. It came in 2nd to the newest 1.9 from source compile. Most impressive.

I have been playing around with the new Falcon Storage Engine for MySQL. It should become the standard engine for MySQL 6.x when it is released to the public and out of beta.

This engine seems much faster than the standard InnoDB engine which has been the mainstay of MySQL 5.x.

It is also interesting that it is much more like the Sql Server 2005 / 2008 engine. In fact Sql Server has had many of these features for quite awhile. I will have to do some benchmarks once Falcon is more stable. InnoDB is faster than the Sql Server engine in some environments, but Sql Server’s enging kicks serious booty in many, many situtations.

Anyhoo, go check out the next generation of MySQL at their site.

An absolute gem of a song from an often forgotten anime series called Project A-Ko.

I really liked the first show, but the sequels kind of left me wanting. Of course, being that the heroine is a super strength fighter (like Fairchild from Gen13 or Supergirl) I watched them anyway.

It is amazing sometimes how such good music can come from such unlikely places.

Not a bad video here either, some good fights, some spaceships, and lots of well super girl stuff

To quote the guy from Robocop, “I like it!“

One of my favorite songs in the world. I have sung this so much at karaoke it is sick. I hope you enjoy.

If I hear one more “architect” state that they can’t use services to store their pictures or handle their “complex” business “processes” I will scream.

Seriously, you folks need to think before you talk and get some real data. I have dealt with Service Oriented Architecture since before there was an acronym for it. Services can handle speed just fine thank you. You need bandwidth. You need processing power. It probably is not the services’ fault your system slows down. It is more than likely something else.

Look at SmugMug. 

They store 500 TB ( nearly half a Petabyte) of photos and data and add nearly  1 TB per day. SmugMug uses Amazon S3, EC2 and SimpleDB. All three of these services rely heavily on, wait for it, web based service APIs and the speed is phenomenal. 

So, for those that missed it, stop complaining about the folk tale that services are not as fast as native. Even if it is true it should not matter!

Services are an architectural decision and should be used if at all possible. Beware of those who slam on the idea. Usually they do not have a real set of data to go by and are working on false assumptions. 

Allons-y!

Just when you think Rails is gonna flounder into the territory of an experiment gone awry, guess what? Ruby on Rails and Merb are merging! Holy tamale!

This is not just good news, this is awesome news. The two frameworks together comprise some of the best web site goodness out there and for them both to come together and become one framework is HOT!

Check out the commemoration page at Ruby on Rails.

In one of the most documented cases of vote fraud to steal an election,the canvassing board in Minnesota continues to make decisions which will lead directly to Al Franken winning the senate election. Sadly, this is becoming the model of politics. If we can’t win by vote, we will win by court.

We saw the same thing in another state in the governor’s election previously. Court and board rulings that were blatantly illegal and biased, but hey if someone on the left is winning it is “the end justifies the means”. 

Pathetic. Illegal. Cowardly.

Before I blow a gasket, go check out this nice layout of exactly how biased and wrong the “impartial” board’s decisions are.

If Republicans did this, Daily KOS would be up in arms. But, of course, since this is going to favor the Democrat, they just ignore or worse fight for the deceptions. 

Honesty is not a thing that can be thrown out when it is politically inconvenient.

Both parties need to learn this. 

As someone who stands for balance this type of behavior is reprehensible. It makes me sick. I hear people talk about Republicans stealing elections, but about the only clearly stolen elections come from the Left. Maybe Democrats should clean your own house before throwing stones, eh.

You are nice people. Most Democrats are kind and caring and idealistic. You folks should not stand for this. It reflects poorly on the grand and wonderful goals you have for government. 

This has always been my problem with Daily KOS.

Sigh, I tell ya. Wordpress sure likes to break the way it does theming. Almost everytime I upgrade it the theme I have selected fails spectacularly. 

Do these people even test? Serious…

Windows Vista has a rather odd issue with the 32 bit version. Seems that the programmers at Microsoft have decided to allocate / reserve almost a gigabyte of RAM to devices even if they don’t exist on the users machine.

This is supposedly because many modern devices require RAM to be mapped into a range for drivers to use. Sadly, this is stupid engineering, but c’est la vie.

How does Microsoft fix this? Uh, by changing the way the RAM quantity is reported. Yep, they manually override the system to report more RAM than is really there so users won’t ask questions. Sigh…

I don’t know why people are still using the 32 bit version of Vista instead of the 64 bit. This should be reason enough to switch. Now, there are some of us that just can’t do it right now because of work or some compatibility issue. That’s cool. I understand. 

Please though, ASAP, get to the 64 bit version. Sad thing is drivers and programs can be an experience to find for the 64 bit side, but, seriously, we need to get moving to 64 bit on the Windows side now. Apple has been there for years and is just kicking Microsoft all over the place in this respect.

I am working out a nice little tutorial on Apple’s Spotlight. This is because I keep finding good info but my normal practice of jfgi ( Just Fraking Google It) for answers has become difficult with so many posts and so much older info. 

To give you an idea of what I am dealing with here, let me describe my content which is indexed.

• 287,000 photographs
• 58,000 movies
• 39,140 documents
• 3,218,000 total files on one RAID ( XServe / XRAID w/ XSan )
• 2,130,000 total files on one 1.0 TB Harddrive

As you can see, this is NOT a normal user’s profile. I am hoping my experience with both content management and indexing systems will come in handy for you all. I have worked with and programmed Sharepoint, Cocoon, Alfresco etc. etc.

I have had all kinds of weird issues with Spotlight from files refusing to index ( plain text files mind you ) and videos ( oh man don’t even get me started ) just stopping the index engine cold. I hope to relate my experiences to you so that you can learn from my exploration and repair operations

PS: As an added tease, I am about to start a new project at Apple with Final Cut Server. I am writing a CMS from scratch to learn more about how these things operate at a fundamental level. I will start posting tutorials in short format ( 5 - 10 minutes ) to get information to you as I find it. Should be an interesting experiment and I hope to get people understanding that this is not easy, in fact making a CMS is HARD!

Cheers!

PPS: You don’t even want to get me started on Vista’s pathetic attempt at indexing. It is just not even funny how lame Windows is at indexing anything. Apple has issues with Spotlight, but Vista is just broken completely and slow as molasses. No excuse either as they have had plenty of time to fix most of the issues they are having.