http://www.misuse.org/science It would be a good idea. Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:23:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en (from American Scientist magazine, Mar-Apr 2008) http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/08/for-the-differently-evolved/ Previously Science and wayneseguin published a study looking at the performance of nginx fair proxy. To take that a little further, Science conducted an examination of how Thin and Mongrel compare head-to-head on performance. For kicks we took a look at Rails page template caching facility to see if that ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/07/thin-vs-mongrel-a-ruby-on-rails-performance-shootout/ By science & wayneeseguin Thin a new-ish application server, primarily designed for serving the same community as Zed Shaw's (and now community managed) masterwork Mongrel. Its job is to dispatch web requests, primarily Rails and other Ruby frameworks. There's plenty already written about Thin, to get you up and running. I've been ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/04/07/thin-ruby-on-rails-nginx-fair-proxy-performance-testing/ There may be much easier ways to do this but Science wrote a nice little regular expression which will convert your numbers to comma delimited strings in pure Ruby. It demonstrates some cool features of Ruby from which maybe you will learn! def comma_numbers(number, delimiter = ',') number.to_s.reverse.gsub(%r{([0-9]{3}(?=([0-9])))}, "\\1#{delimiter}").reverse end # here ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/03/27/converting-numbers-or-currency-to-comma-delimited-format-with-ruby-regex/ A couple of great blog posts have come out in the last year, dealing with how to squeeze more performance out of Ruby on Rails. These techniques are actually massively improving the performance of Ruby on Rails, so much so that I'm starting to think of Rails less as an ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/02/22/rails-page-caching-nginx-ssi-ajax-and-form-posts/ Science releases MojoMagick, an Ruby language image library "that does very little" (tm). There are several useful image tools that "do a lot" - MojoMagick is designed to just a few things: Be fast Don't leak memory Make simple ImageMagick tasks, simple as Ruby tasks Permit direct access to ImageMagick for complex tasks (i.e. ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/01/30/mojomagick-ruby-image-library-for-imagemagick/ Passing multiple arguments in Ruby is easy. You can pass any number of arguments, and even vary the class/types according to context. You can even vary the number of arguments passed. The receiver has to deal with this somehow, but even that's pretty easy to manage. It's a little trickier ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/01/30/passing-multiple-arguments-in-ruby-is-your-friend/ A larger world exists, but we have never looked at it. We are too concerned with our microscopes or our magnifying glasses. We try to make things large by using magnifying glasses—but we have never looked at outer space with our naked eyes. If we looked into it, we could ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2008/01/27/on-magnifying-glasses-microscopes-and-the-act-of-looking/ Science regularly has to synchronize files across file systems. Normally, this would involve a Ruby script or something heinous in a shell language. But that's just business. When the synchronization is complex, the problem is much more difficult. Answering questions like these becomes a major painola: was the file deleted ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2007/12/23/synchronizing-files/ ActiveMerchant is a very nice little Ruby library that permits connecting to payment processing gateways to charge money against credit cards. To understand how this works, you need to know that there are two separate entities, a "payment gateway" and a "merchant account" (aka a bank). The Payment Gateway receives ... http://www.misuse.org/science/2007/12/13/using-activemerchant-to-process-credit-cards-in-rubyrails/