First off, apologies for this post’s title. It had to be done, though. On Monday, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company. When I first read about it, one eyebrow raised slightly, but I didn’t think much of it. Then I started noticing comments coming in from my friends and colleagues talking about how they felt about it.
Category Archives: Web Stuff
Upgraded to WordPress 2.2
Posted by fdiv_bug
on May 20, 2007
1 comment
Just a quick post to test whether or not my upgrade to WordPress 2.2 was successful.
Thoughts on Rails Performance
Posted by fdiv_bug
on March 6, 2007
1 comment
- 2007-03-07: Added results for testing with Mongrel and the ActiveRecord session store using MyISAM tables.
As many of you know I’m a rather big fan of Ruby on Rails, the web application development framework. I adore Ruby as a language for all sorts of tasks, and I’ve found I’m able to get a great deal of work done very quickly with Rails and its approach to web application design. I’m not alone in theUpdated se beliefs, too, as the Rails community grew rapidly, and the software has many fans.
One of its “Achilles’ heels,” however, is performance. The Rails framework is very large, Ruby’s performance tends to lag behind that of other common web languages (at least, in Ruby 1.8; 2.0 is going to bring us an entirely new interpreter with significant performance boosts), and the recommendations from the community for significantly boosting performance tend to largely sound similar to “cache it!” It’s all a trade-off, just like everything in technology and life, however — what costs you incur in actual request-per-second performance tend to easily be made up for in improved developer productivity and happiness. The value for not having to bang your head against a wall dealing with JSP/Servlets or PHP and its abundance of code-in-view SQL is significant.
But I was curious just what kind of performance we were talking about. Read more »
New Look
Posted by fdiv_bug
on September 13, 2006
1 comment
I decided I’d grown weary of the old style for the site and came across a theme I rather liked. It’s called “Off-Center” for obvious reasons, but I’m not 100% sure I’m going to leave it that way; I might expand it out to fill the whole page. It was designed by the awesome WordPress Diva and I highly recommend you check out her site if you’ve got a WordPress blog and are looking for a new theme.
Sun’s “First One’s Free” Push
Posted by fdiv_bug
on June 19, 2006
1 comment
Sun Microsystems, venerable system and software vendor of the Unix world, has a rather interesting promo going on. It’s part of their try-before-you-buy deal, where you can get a free 60-day run on one of their mid- or high-end servers and workstations. According to Jonathan in his blog post, if you post a thorough review (in the eyes of the product team) regardless of whether it’s favorable or not, you can keep the system for free. Presumably they’ll take your words and use them as marketing copy if appropriate, but for a free Sun system they could use them to promote an end to tooth-brushing for all I care. 
I’ve already submitted my application for an Ultra 40 dual-Opteron workstation. I intend to use it for testing Ruby on Rails deployment and performance. I’d like to install Rails on Solaris 10 (preinstalled!), Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Server 2003 to see which one comes across as most manageable, and with the best performance. This is the first of my entries in that series.
I selected the Ultra 40 workstation primarily because that’s what will fit best in my office at home, under my desk, and it gives me the ability to test Windows in the equation as well as Linux distributions that don’t support SPARC64. We’ll see how this shapes up, and I’ll try to keep you posted.