A few words from a “Graceful Authentic”

Three-fourths of IITians are in United States

Getting Started with Clojure and Aquamacs

I just posted a short screencast on how to get started with Clojure and Aquamacs:

One of the fun features of Clojure, or any Lisp I suppose, is the interactive development workflow. As you can see in the video, you write code by creating expressions that define functions and then you evaluate those functions in the REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop). You can redefine a function at any time. You can imagine that if you had a production system running, you could connect to it via a REPL or something like that, evaluate some expressions that redefine functions that contain bugs, and the system would be fixed with no downtime.

Here's the contents of the ~/bin/clj script:

#!/bin/bash 

SRC_DIR=/Users/pbarry/src

CLOJURE_JAR=$SRC_DIR/clojure/clojure.jar
JLINE_JAR=$SRC_DIR/jline/jline-0.9.94.jar

if [ -z "$1" ]; then 
    java -cp $JLINE_JAR:$CLOJURE_JAR jline.ConsoleRunner clojure.lang.Repl    
else
    java -cp $CLOJURE_JAR clojure.lang.Script $1
fi

You don’t need story-points either

Run!

Cookies by Design rocks.

Canon 1D Mark III

Broken mirrors and fingernails

BBC's Cloud Clicks; More SaaS for the rest of us

Part of LG Ad; Thanks to Szymon

Background Processing in Rails Using 'at'

So here's a fairly typical problem that happens in the Rails world: you have a long-running process that you need to offload/queue up, and you don't have time to fuck around with some kind of elegant solution. Before, either I'd just make the user eat it and wait for the long request (at the risk of timing out the request and/or pissing off the user), or figure out some way to procrastinate on implementing the feature in the first place.

But alas, I came to a situation that absolutely had to be offloaded: a 50MB file import that takes about 3-5 minutes to process. The request is guaranteed to time out, and it is something that will be done fairly regularly. I'd love to tell my users "Hey, this shit is going to break, but it will be the best and most awesome breaking you've ever seen," but somehow I don't think that would fly. Damn. I don't want to screw around for two days trying to cook up some kind of "scalable" solution involving worker processes and messaging queues. I don't need scalability (this will be run 2 or 3 times a week, max), I just need it to work.

When faced with a problem like this, I think web developers in general underestimate the massive amounts of thought and effort that have gone into the systems that we use every day and generally take for granted. We tend to live in our own little bubbles and think that somehow, our problems are brand new, and that they've never been solved before. Well, guess what: almost all of them have been solved before, have been solved better, and are included in almost all Unix systems out there.

Enter at

If you have a command, and want to have it wait a tick before it starts working, and want the work of several jobs to be handled in some kind of sane fashion, at is the perfect solution. Like most things Unix, at is pretty damned simple. You have a set of commands in some kind of a file. You want to execute them at some date in the future. You send those to at: at -t 07021824 -f /path/to/my/commands. That's pretty damned beautiful.

Now, putting it in Rails is actually damned easy. I wrote a 3-line method in my ApplicationController so that I can offload any arbitrary command. Take a look at this awesome sauce:

def offload(command)
  job_id = MD5.hexdigest("#{command}+#{Time.now.to_i}+#{$$}")
  `echo "#{RAILS_ROOT}/script/runner -e #{RAILS_ENV} \\"#{command}\\"" > /tmp/#{job_id} &&
   at -t #{1.minute.from_now.strftime("%m%d%H%M")} -f /tmp/#{job_id}`
end

Every time I need to offload some arbitrary command, all I do is pass it to offload: offload("Part.import_bom('#{massive_file}')"). Simple as pie.

Scaling? You say you want scaling? You have 3 application servers that you want to dish these offloaded processes to as equitably as possible? You are also as lazy as I am? Awesome:

APP_SERVERS = ["172.16.200.50", "172.16.200.51", "172.16.200.52"]
def offload(command)
  job_id = MD5.hexdigest("#{command}+#{Time.now.to_i}+#{$$}")
  `ssh user@#{APP_SERVERS[rand(APP_SERVERS.size)]} "echo \\"#{RAILS_ROOT}/script/runner -e #{RAILS_ENV} \\\\"#{command}\\\\"\\" > /tmp/#{job_id} &&
   at -t #{1.minute.from_now.strftime("%m%d%H%M")} -f /tmp/#{job_id}"`
end

Now you've got your distributed job queue implemented. Three lines of code. Win.

Sidenote: If your dev machine is running OSX like mine is, and you want this to work, you're going to have to run the command sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.atrun.plist and restart before this stuff will work locally.

Autotest and KNotify

I’ve configured KNotify to work with ZenTest. To see knotify messages just drop below code to ~/.autotest

module KDENotify
 def self.span str, color
   "<span style=\"color: #{color}\">#{str}</span>" 
 end

 def self.notify title, msg, color
   system "dcop knotify default notify " +
          "eventname '#{span(title, color)}' '#{span(msg, color)}' '' '' 16 2" 
   end

 Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
   if at.results.split("\n").last.first =~ /([0-9]+\sexamples,\s([0-9]+)\sfailures?(,\s([0-9]+) pending)?)/
     message, failures, pending = $1, $2.to_i, $4.to_i
     if failures > 0
       notify "Tests failed", message, "darkred" 
     elsif pending > 0
       notify "Tests passed with some tests pending", message, "goldenrod" 
     else
       notify "Tests passed", message, "darkgreen" 
     end
   end
 end
end

Twitter Updates for 2008-07-02

Broadside for broadband | Mercury - The Voice of Tasmania [del.icio.us]

datastructures question

Houston Startup Happy Hour

Early Friday

Ingrid Betancourt a été libérée…

The Not So Long Tail

A friend who once commented that Wired was the Cosmo of technology news would’ve appreciated the following from the article, “Study Refutes Niche Theory Spawned by Web,” in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Faithful readers of this column might recall its own skepticism about the idea when the book first hit the stores. In retrospect, “The Long Tail” seems to have followed the template of many Wired articles: take a partly true, modestly interesting, tech-friendly idea and puff it up to Second Coming proportions.

Startup Profile: Roov.com

Wordees.

Remember this one?

In het kort:

The Big Word Project is redefining words. Search for your word and link it to your website. Your website is then the new definition. (more)

Ik heb toen nifty gekocht en daardoor kreeg ik vorige week een mail in de bus.

Paddy van The Big Word Project is on tour in Europa. Belgie is zijn eerste stop en ik was vanmiddag de eerste in een rij wordees (word-owners).

Omdat Karmeliet naar mijn mening het beste/betere belgisch bier is en ge moet dat dan toch gedronken hebben als toerist, zijn we er een eentje gaan drinken in het patersvatje (Antwerpen). Tof gebabbeld (er was nog een vriend en vriendin bij, namen vergeten sorry) vervolgens een klein interviewtje gedaan en nog wat tof gebabbeld :)

De mens heeft ook twitter account, spijtig dat we niet hebben gegeten, anders was het een @twunch ;)

Fijn. Internetpeeps zouden dat meer moeten doen.

rimshot

Sporty me.

Ongeveer 40 km. Dat heb ik vandaag gefietst. Straf eh!

• Naar kantoor.
• Van kantoor naar ‘t stad.
• Van ‘t stad naar kantoor.
• Van kantoor naar huis.

De rest van de avond voor dood in de zetel ...

2d

2D atom.

How Creationists Explain Evolution - SCARY

Writers Mugs Block Print Gallery - HOME PAGE

Coding Horror: Alan Turing, the Father of Computer Science

marsyas svn

svn co https://marsyas.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/marsyas/trunk marsyas

Process Theatre

Blue Sage Realty Sucks, Apparently

Building a Carputer

Видеозаписи И.Н. Калинаускаса

2008년 7월 2일

• 불타는삼나무님께 토큰50개를 선물했습니다 – SKT 정액제 가입 감사드립니다. (꽃띠앙이벤트 일곱번째)2008-07-02 12:20:59

이 글은 꽃띠앙님의 2008년 7월 2일의 미투데이 내용입니다.

Optimiser les performances d’un site web

Tahiti gets a name and an initial code push

HTTP Response 500!?

response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(uri_str))

uri = URI.parse(uri_str)
http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host)
response = http.send_request('GET', uri.request_uri, {"User-Agent" => "Mozilla/5.0"})

Agile Community Building using Social Software

adamwiggins's rest-client at master — GitHub

Hospedando imagem e Animações em flash (swf) para Orkut