about: things
on me and coding and some things

as you all might warm up already for railsconf europe in berlin later this year i would like to let you know that the berlin user group got its own wiki now. After Florian Gersdorf did restart the meetings earlier this year we are happy to host the rug-b meeting every first thursday of the month at our place in /i-d media. And now, thanks to Benjamin Krause, we got our own place at http://www.rug-b.com/ where we set up the instiki wiki for a better overview on the berlin activities. Have a look over there for agenda, locations, timeings, whatsoever.

For all of our conference guest in berlin in september the rug-b started brainstorming about some special events and/or try to arrange for some benefits with berlin infrastructure. So come to Berlin, hope to see you soon!

I’m in no way linked to O’Reilly or the conference but in any case i’m quite willing to help making the berlin rails conference an even better one than the last. So when you have question or ideas for some socializing events around the rug-b or berlin just drop me a note.


UPDATE: wer des englischen nicht maechtig ist, dem soll versichert sein das “we are happy to host the rug-b meeting” nicht bedeutet, dass ich oder mein arbeitgeber der Veranstalter sind, sondern nur der Gastgeber. Scheinbar hat das der Kommentator nicht ganz mitbekommen. Ansprechpartner sind oben also genannt, aber wer will kann selbstverstaendlich auch mich ansprechen. Oder lieber anonym kommentieren, ganz wie es beliebt.

cheers.


Technorati Tags: railsconf, ruby, usergroup, berlin, idmedia, rug-b

We had our 2nd ruby users group berlin meeting yesterday with two speakers and the demo of the yet to be released omdb.org project.

First was Tim Lossen giving a good round-up of the JRuby developments. Not of much interest to me because i have’t touched Java in a while. There was a common understanding that JRuby is a good thing and will pave Rubys way into the enterprise world, and with Sun now as official backing partner, JRuby is heading for a 1.0 release this summer for Javaworld confererence. You can already run JRuby based Rails applications inside you IBM Websphere Application server, Yeah! But can you run a Rails application with JRuby from inside a Java applet on your client browser? Hm, interesting idea, we couldn’t answer that yesterday.

Next was the talk by Murphy about the state of the ruby 1.9 release. Murphy mainly used Mauricio Fernandez eigenclass for reference and gave a really great overview around the three main themes of this topic: Roadmap, New and changed features and performance. Everybody loves the hand drawn roadmap image(which i can’t find now) and while a Ruby2.0 release being something from a far utopian future, we might see a 1.9 release later this year. I’m actually not following the 1.9 developments but became inspired to check again. Enumerators for examples reminded me to my STL/C++ years, just now without the template pains :-) Interessting were his comments on performance. Tim already showed some charts which related the JRuby to some other implementations and Murphy made some own benchmarks which were pretty much in line with Tims data. The general information is that 1.9(==YARV) is a couple of times faster, ranging from 3 to 10 times faster. BUT! and that is a big but, Murphy did report that on the real life applications he tested, the speed-up was close to insignificant for various applications. This is because the the performance tuning in 1.9 seems to be focussing on benchmark relevant stuff. And real life application are hardly build from benchmark functionallity. This sounds like, been there, seen that before. History(benchmark tweaking) is repeating itself. For me it doesn’t matter. When others can do 4000 requests/second, ruby/rails is definitly fast enough for me.

Finally Benjamin Krause showcased his upcoming OMDB project(tech blog, development version, live). OMDB is a IMDb in wikipedia style with a creative commons licence. 16501 People(see comment) 16000 movies are already in the database and once it will open up, everybody can extend it. Thats a cool idea conceptually and what he showed technically was nothing less than the equivalent to an “Full House” in poker. For example the subsecond async response times for fetching actors from a huge database which were made possible by his ferret magic. impressive.

And this also led to the agenda for the next meeting where Benjamin will give a talk about ferret on Rails. Everybody wanted to see more of it. Also we will have a talk by Adam about AmzonWebServices: S3 and Rails on EC2 . I’m looking forward to it. And about the open mic section, i’m pretty sure we are releasing our foto-foo into the wild.

And for you to have some fun, we plan to record the talks next time and put them up as podcasts to fit with your online consumption habits. Murphy and Tim also promised to upload their talks for online viewing (to the wiki i guess).

looks like the ruby users group berlin is consolidating.

Technorati Tags: ruby, usergroup, YARV, jruby, omdb, imdb, idmedia, berlin,

a kind of buzzwordy post title, i know, but hey, at least i kept the unavoidable second life out of it. For reasons far from being thrilling enough to tell here i pulled the latest hpricot release and made my server pull the latest stats from linden labs frontpage every 6 hours. I’m kind of sad I could not get it up before the (ridiculous)3293499 residents mark, but once SL will hit the billion, it will still look like a pioneer. So here is the beef: I made a cronjob screenscraping secondlife’s stats from their frontpage. A nice graph from the data i will put up soon hopefuly. And stay tuned for the raw data feed if you like. Lets see, a week i guess, before it becomes a nice exponential curve.

1. get value elements from the stats div

   v = Hpricot(open("http://www.secondlife.com")).search("#SL_stats strong")

2. make it digestible

   v.map { |e| e.innerText.gsub(/[$,]/, "").to_i }

3. dump the stuff

   # is left as an exercise to the reade

   and mine you’ll get right here.