Gregg’s “Speeding up Ruby, without the Rails” Presentation
He points out that the C library stuff is going to cause blocking, because Ruby’s threading manager doesn’t know when it can stop execution. He demos this with mysqlplus, showing 10 queries with the blocking driver, and then showing mysqlplus which is the non-blocking driver. 10x speedup.
He points […]

Continue reading about Gregg’s “Speeding up Ruby, without the Rails” Presentation



Tim on November 6th, 2008

Thursday AM Keynote by Matz
This is Matz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto
He’s talking about his love of languages, and why he got into Ruby.
He’s addressing some of the criticisms, that it’s slow, poorly implemented, embedding issues…he says the list of complaints goes on forever.
But, now he’s talking about why is Ruby good. He says people say it’s enjoyable, that […]

Continue reading about RubyConf 2008 Keynote by Matsumoto

Tim on November 6th, 2008

I’m here at RubyConf with some of the Cloudspace team. Also, Corey has come in from North Carolina, gracing us with his presence, and his beard.
I’ll probably be posting from some of the sessions as I go. Long posts will be on this blog, short things and ‘overheards’ will be on my Twitter.
If you’re here, […]

Continue reading about RubyConf 2008!

Tim on October 17th, 2008

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Matt Williams’s presentation on Ruby and Arduino, here are some videos, slides, and notes from the ORUG site.
You absolutely must check this out. The field of robotics is going to play such a massive role in all of our lives over the next few years, and this is […]

Continue reading about Arduino Follow-up

Tim on October 16th, 2008

Just got back from this month’s ORUG, where Matthew Williams gave a presentation on using Ruby to control an Arduino. Matt is a very natural speaker, and the presentation was great. He even demoed a bartending robot he built, which should be featured on Make very soon.
I took notes during the presentation, and they are […]

Continue reading about Physical Computing with Ruby and Arduino

After lots of code, tests, and fun, I’ve produced a Firefox extension to add a useful, new feature to Twitter, as opposed to writing Twitter extensions as a joke
Simply put, the extension provides autocomplete for Twitter usernames from your own list of friends while you’re using the web interface at twitter.com. It’s totally […]

Continue reading about Twitter Autocomplete (Tw-autocomplete Firefox Extension)

Tim on September 23rd, 2008

OK, here’s the deal, as quick as I can put it, but with enough words that Google will correctly index this post and make this information easier to find for the next person who needs it.
Let’s say you’re developing a Firefox extension, and you need to look at the HTML of the page. You know […]

Continue reading about Javascript Events, the DOM, and Firefox/Gecko

Tim on September 16th, 2008

OK, so the title of this post might be a bit overstating.
But, if you work with Javascript and need to use dates/times, you should absolutely check out a JS library for formatted dates and times by Steven Levithan (who is obviously cool; his blog is titled “Flagrant Badassery”).
It’s a library that extends the stock Date […]

Continue reading about Javascript, Dates, Times, and One Man’s Dream

Tim on September 15th, 2008

Detecting page loads is a useful ability. It’s easy enough to throw in a
gBrowser.addEventListener(”load”, function_name, true);
But, it causes extra events to get generated. There’s load events occurring in the browser that aren’t page loads. The trick to detecting real page loads (but not Back/Forward navigation when the page is still in memory — only page […]

Continue reading about Detecting page loads in a Firefox Extension

Tim on August 26th, 2008

Corey sent me a link to Ubiquity, a dynamic-mashup-maker-that-reminds-me-of-Quicksilver. The video is cool looking, I may keep an eye on this project to see where they go with it. I think it’s a useful tool if you have these specific tasks coming up often, and the ability to make new commands is neat.

Continue reading about Mash it yourself