Posted by Scott Hughes
Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:36:00 GMT
I followed, with some interest, the series of post by David Heinemeier Hansson (from 37Signals, creator of Rails) where he took an Enterprise Architect to task for some really uneducated comments about Ruby. Reading through the post by this guy (Jimmy McSomething, don’t want to give him anymore pagerank love than he’s already getting) it seems that he might be just a little bit retarded (and I mean that medically, not in the mean-spirited sense). There are some people in the comments who’ve posted that some of his observations are so wrong that it must be a joke. I was kind of wandering if his blog was written by a random Enterprise Architect Blog generator. Off his Blogger page, he has a couple of other blogs which follow much the same format. The big key is the random pictures that he inserts in the middle of the post (some of Rumsfeld, or other politico’s) which are neither funny nor related to the context of the post.
Today I stumbled across some new evidence. I found a trackback on one of my posts to his article. Could it be that his blog-bot is trying to increase his pagerank by trackback-spamming his article to blogs which have discussed Ruby? Even though I’ve mentioned Ruby quite a bit on this blog, the aforementioned post was not at all Ruby related… The author of the trackback is the same as his blog title. I tried to see if I could tie the IP address (72.9.234.70) back to him in some way, but gave up on that rather soon.
That just struck me as odd. Seems that successfully pissing off the Ruby crowd (or any group which is fanatical) is a good way to get yourself to the top of the google list for the keyword of your choice. For example, what if I called myself a “First-Rank Knowledge Engineer” and decided that, based on my expertise in the field, Wikipedia was absolutely the worst source of actual “facts” or “knowledge” that I could possibly imagine (worse than what a train full of brain-dead monkeys could generate)… Do you think I could rise to the top of the Knowledge Engineering index?
Posted in Technology | Tags enterprise_architect, ruby, spam, trackback | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Hughes
Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:50:00 GMT
My old friend P.O. Boykin recently took a look at Ruby (and other scripting languages) and came up with a very interesting post: Performance of Programming Languages
After spending time with so called “scripting languages” (a term that I feel is not a terribly well defined or useful), I have found that I enjoy programming in languages like Ruby, Python, and Boo more than languages like C, C++, Java, or C# (though C# is getting better and better as they improve the language). My question is: how much performance do I loose by adopting one these laguages. To answer this question I took a look at the Language Shootout site.
I hadn’t heard of the Language Shootout site; that’s a very interesting link. They compare the implementations of your favorite programming languages (and are very careful not to say they compare the actual language, just the implementation) and produce a whole lot of “at-a-glance” graphs.
I’m a very recent fan(atic) of Ruby. I still don’t “think” in Ruby, just because I don’t have enough trench time with it. But I subscribe to the Google group RSS feed for comp.lang.ruby, and it’s very common to find code snippets (usually in response to a question) that just make me smile. Since more than half of the work I do at my job is using a PC to communicate with a significantly slower device (parallel FPGA, usb or serial Micro, or a 1-Wire device), I try to sneak scripting solutions in wherever I can. If the PC takes 100x more cpu time to compute a message that is going to be put on a slow bus (several orders of magnitude slower than the cpu) noone is going to notice the loss of a few extra nanoseconds. That said, I usually need to hand code off to other people (those so-called “paying customers”) and using a more popular programming language (C or Java) makes that hand-off much easier.
But for some of my tasks, Ruby’s elegance outweighs any of the performance penalties. Ruby is still fairly young, so I’m hoping that in the near future it will reach a good level of general acceptance and gain some significant performance improvements (thanks to all the eyes it now has on it). Also, I think it’d be interesting to run the same benchmarks the Language Shootout guys did, but using either YARV [1] or RB2C [2]. Seems that if those projects don’t do better than vanilla Python, they should re-think their solution. It’d be nice to see if they are able to tighten the large margins between the Java or .NET runtime.
[1] YARV: Yet Another Ruby VM - http://www.atdot.net/yarv/
[2] RB2C : a Ruby to C converter http://www-lab09.kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~hiwada/ruby/rb2c/
Posted in Code | Tags benchmark, Code, ruby | 4 comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:08:00 GMT
I read over on Penny Arcade that they’ve converted their site to Rails. This is pretty big news for Rails advocates. Penny Arcade has over 4 million readers… And after browsing their new site, I find it pretty damn fast. There is a large speed improvement over their php implementation. So they definitely took advantage of Rail’s caching feature. Of course, the biggest difference will be transparent to their readers, but it should be a hell of a lot easier to maintain and add new features.
Posted in Technology | Tags pennyarcade, Rails, ruby, RubyOnRails | no comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 14:34:00 GMT
Last night, I updated this Typo install to the latest svn trunk (rev 725). I had been running at rev 586 for a while now, but I was hesitant to upgrade as I noticed there were a few database changes. Turns out that, thanks to Rails Migrations, the database changes were simple (for me anyways, maybe not for the author of the migrations). While I was at it, I went ahead and updated Typo to run the latest Edge Rails also. Here’s the procedure I used on Dreamhost to install these:
# Get Latest Typo
$ svn co svn://leetsoft.com/typo/trunk typo-edge
# Get Latest Rails
$ cd typo-edge/vendor
$ svn co http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk rails
$ cd ..
$ rake update_javascripts
$ rake add_new_scripts
# Copy My Typo Configuration
$ cp ../{old-typo}/config/database.yml config/database.yml
$ cp -r ../{old-typo}/themes/globalreset themes/globalreset
$ vi config/environment.rb #forced RAILS_ENV='production'
# Update link I use to point to a version of Typo
# My setup expects web root at this link/public
$ rm typo
$ ln -s typo-edge typo
Then I opened my browser and navigated to /admin and was immediately prompted with a list of necessary Database Migrations, which must be performed on my existing database to be compatible with this version of Typo. I clicked affirmatively, and after a few seconds I was running the latest and greatest Rails and Typo.
Make sure you backup your database before attempting this. The web-based phpMyAdmin that Dreamhost provides is suitable for this. I’ve seen a couple of users report on the Typo-ML that they had some migration issues. I don’t know if those issues ended up in a wedged database or not, but better safe than sorry.
Posted in Code | Tags Rails, ruby, RubyOnRails, Typo | 4 comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:13:00 GMT
RubyConf 2005 is underway and I’m hoping that the slides from the presentations will be available soon. I found that Kevin Clark is live-blogging RubyConf and is doing a pretty good job of it (Thanks, Kevin!).
His notes from the progress report on YARV: Yet Another Ruby VM are an especially interesting read. Maybe YARV will finally help answer the question, “Does RubyOnRails Scale?”
Thanks to Ezra Zygmuntowicz, you can start listening in on some presentations as well.
Update: Matz’s slides from his keynote speech on the future of Ruby are now available online. He talks about a lot of cool ideas that are going to keep Ruby 2.0 very fun. There’s even a video(198mb).
Posted in Code, Technology | Tags Code, ruby, rubyconf | no comments
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