Caffeinated Simpleton » Blog Archive » An Introduction to JavaScript’s “this”.

Nice summary of using apply() and bind() to make functions work in the right context.

Adding Columns to large MySQL Tables Quickly

Onehub • Adding Columns to large MySQL Tables Quickly.

Simple Example Rails migration creates a copy of the original table and then deletes the old table while renaming the new table. Performance impact is frustratingly high – oh MySQL, *sigh*

State of the Couch

http://jan.prima.de/plok/archives/180-The-State-of-the-Couch-The-Invited-Talk-at-the-Erlang-Workshop-at-ICFP-in-Edinburgh-in-2009.html

Nice summary of CouchDB’s status from Jan Lenhardt speaking at the Erlang Workshop at ICFP in Edinburgh. Especially interesting to me are his concerns for Erlang’s “Open Source-ness”.

Remember how many problems the Java community had with similar problems? Or the benevolent dictatorship problems other projects have? It seems to help initially to get things rollin’ but in later stages it becomes more and more of a problem. Let’s see what’s going to happen next!

Why should I use ruby-config instead of rvm?

From what I can tell after examining their website is that rvm works very similar to ruby-config. It has the same basic feature set and works quite similar by changing symlinks and environment settings.

It definitely looks more polished to me and has most probably seen more usage lately due to its recent popularity. BTW, I love their website design.

So, what speaks for ruby-config? It is written in Ruby and has complete test coverage. It will probably attract the more ruby-oriented developer, since it has a low entry barrier for contributing back. Personally, I refrain from maintaining large bash scripts, having them replaced several years ago with Perl scripts, which I replaced later on happily with Ruby. No pun intended And I simply enjoy working with Ruby!

Healthy competition is good in my opinion. I’ll get in touch with rvm’s maintainer to see where both projects strengths are and how we can both improve our projects by learning from each other.

Very nice vector drawing using javascript and DOM. Meaning you can actually attach javascript events to DOM elements. And on top of that it works with all existing browsers, unlike Canvas. http://ajaxian.com/archives/raphael-10-rc-get-your-graphics-on

Nice summary on the reasoning of Desktop vs Web Apps: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-apps/

Gem Packaging Best Practices: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/9/1/gem-packaging-best-practices.

THE Apple Snow Leopard Review: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars. This is 24 pages!

How to use Perforce’s Merge Tool http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Git/UsingP4MergeWithGit.red

Just released ruby-config 0.7. Most interestingly I changed the user interface to be command based instead of using option switches.

So, instead of:
ruby-config --list-installed

you can do a simple:
ruby-config list

In case you missed the 0.6 release. Most noteworthy I fixed the chicken-egg problem where a newly installed Ruby runtime doesn’t have the ruby-config gem installed yet. I’ve started maintaining Release Notes to make it more convenient to follow changes in the future.