Rockstar Memcaching

Posted 2 days back at Too-biased - Home

I’m back from Rubyfringe which was hands down the best conference i’ve been to.

Pete Forde asked me to present on memcached (mem-cache-dee) after my popular blog article Secret to memcached. The talk covers different use cases such as simple html snippet stores to advanced expiry systems such as generational cache keys.

Every talk at rubyfringe was taped so I’ll update this space with the video once its online. In the meantime enjoy the slides which probably make zero sense on their own.

Download the PDF or watch it on slideshare:

P.S: 30 minute is the ideal length for talks at a Tech Conference.

RDoc 2.1.0

Posted 2 days back at Segment7

RDoc is an application that produces documentation for one or more Ruby source files. RDoc includes the `rdoc` and `ri` tools for generating and displaying online documentation.

At this point in time, RDoc 2.x is a work in progress and may incur further API changes beyond what has been made to the RDoc 1.0.1. Command-line tools are largely unaffected, but internal APIs may shift rapidly.

• 3 Major Enhancements:
  • RDoc now knows about meta-programmed methods, see RDoc::Parser::Ruby
  • Reorganized parsers under RDoc::Parser base class
  • ri now walks the ancestors of a class looking for a method e.g. ri File#read displays documentation for IO#read (may require regeneration of ri data)
• 5 Minor Enhancements:
  • Allow links to files
  • Default options now taken from RDOCOPT environment variable
  • Class method documentation can be found at toplevel now (def X.foo)
  • Allow HTML templates distributed as gems to be loaded with the -T option, just like the standard templates in rdoc/generator/html (so an HTML template lib/new_template.rb in a gem can be used with rdoc -T new_template)
  • `rdoc -v` prints out files, classes, modules and methods as it goes
• 11 Bug Fixes:
  • `ri Foo.bar` now looks for class methods also
  • Sections work in the default template again
  • Doesn’t warn about :foo:: list item being an unrecognized directive
  • RDoc no longer converts characters inside tt tags
  • Fixed “unitialized constant RDoc::Markup::ToHtml::HTML”
  • Fixed generation of relative links
  • Fixed various diagram generation issues
  • Fixed templates broken by switch to erb
  • Fixed issue with <!- -> style comments
  • Lowercase words are no longer rdoc’d as methods without leading #, as described in the documentation
  • RDoc now correctly sets superclasses if they were originally unknown

My RubyFringe highlights

Posted 2 days back at work.rowanhick.com

My new home town (not just the place I live, but now HOMEtown) rocks. The unspace crew did a freaking amazing job on RubyFringe. Joey has a huge list of notes on his blog if you want some nitty gritty.

For me personally, here’s the stand outs…

- I have to say Damien Katz’s presentation was extremely raw and powerful. The story of how CouchDB came to be will stick around in a lot of peoples minds for a very long time I’m sure.
- Giles Bowkit’s talk was just an assault on the senses. Wow. Almost want to go to Burning Man now. Looking over the shoulder of my cohort’s laptop on the backchanel it seemed dead quiet in the 5 secs I peeled my eyes off stage.
- Nick Sieger’s Jazz presentation taught me more in 30 mins than any music class ever has (not that I attended many) did in school. Even though I love music. Love it to bits. But he broke it down so well I was stunned. Wow. Thank you.
- Mr Grigsby. Resourceful. What more can I say. This dude plays the system hard.
- Leila had a hard job having the last talk of the day, but her essence was on the money, do something people love (and therefore value) and you’ll do well. If your customers love the stuff you build. You’ve got it made. She showed an extremely hard core passion for her company. Fantastic.
- Less than 200 people seems a perfect number for networking. Not large enough that you’re anonymous, not small enough so you’re talking to the same people. Met so many great people. Hope to stay in touch.
- Libin, my man, you should be THE official Canon product tester. I believe he was trying to hit 1k photos. at time of posting 413 odd photos were up on Flickr but he hasn’t uploaded Sunday’s yet…

Surprisingly technology was less of a focus of most everyone’s presentations. Instead of the usual tech stuff every day on blogs, to mix things up the talks really got into the hearts, minds, and souls of the presenters. All of which just can’t be conveyed in the web medium. The tech presentations that were given were solid as well, it felt like just the right mix between screeds of cool innovative code and deep talks.

It’s amazing what can be achieved in just 30mins !

BryanL demos Github Gist

Posted 2 days back at Smarticus - Home

At RubyFringe, the Github showed a demo of one of their newest creates, Gist. I’ve created a video exploring the soon-to-come goodness. Think Pastie on steroids.

<object height="600" width="800"> <param /> <param /> <param /> <embed src="http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1381658&amp;server=www.vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" height="600" width="800"></embed></object>
BryanL demos Gist: A Super Hot Pastebin from Bryan Liles on >Vimeo.

Nginx Upload Module

Posted 2 days back at Brainspl.at

Valery Kholodkov has written a very cool nginx module for handling uploads.

The way this works is that you specify a location block to handle the uploads. So if you are using the standard nginx.conf for rails apps then you would add this in your server block right above your “location /” block:

    # Upload form should be submitted to this location
    location /upload {
      # Pass altered request body to this location
      upload_pass   /internalupload;

      # Store files to this location
      upload_store /tmp;

      # Set specified fields in request body
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.name "$upload_file_name";
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.content_type "$upload_content_type";
      upload_set_form_field $upload_field_name.path "$upload_tmp_path";
    }

    # Pass altered request body to a proxy
    location /internalupload {
        proxy_pass   http://mongrel;
    }

Then make a simple upload form that does a multipart POST to /upload. Now you can have your Rails or Merb app on the backend with a route called /upload. In the action of your app that responds to the /upload route you will get a set of params that look like this(assume the name of your upload fields is called ‘file1’ and ‘file2’):

{"file2.path"=>"/tmp/0000123459", "file1.path"=>"/tmp/0000123458",
"file2.content_type"=>"image/png",  "submit"=>"Upload",
 "file2.name"=>"Picture 2.png", "action"=>"index", 
"file1.name"=>"Picture 1.png",  "controller"=>"test", 
"file1.content_type"=>"image/png", "test"=>"value"}

What this is doing if parsing the multi-part mime boundaries in C in the nginx plugin, putting the parsed files into files in /tmp and then stipping the multipart stuff out of the POST body and replacing it with the info you need to get the name and location of the file on disk.

This means that by the time the request hits your application, the expensive mime parsing is already done and you simply move the file to it’s final resting place. This is a huge win since now the hard work is done in C in nginx before your app ever gets involved.

Of course this is a fresh new module so do your own testing and deciding whether or not this is a fit for your needs. But I think this is a great plugin and have verified it works as advertised.

Opinions: What is The Optimal Business Model for Today's Web?

Posted 3 days back at InfoQ Personalized Feed for unregistered user - Register to upgrade!

What is the optimal business model for today’s web? Opinions diverge in a series of articles around this issue. While authors seem to share the conviction that simplicity is the key in web environment, they do not necessarily put the same meaning into this term. Is less really more? Or should it rather be more with less? And how do we achieve it? By Sadek Drobi