CouchDB

CouchDB is a distributed non-relational database written in Erlang. It is unique in that its main query interface is simply HTTP REST, and for every UPDATE, it simply creates a new version of the row. Additionally, you can request the entire history of a row very simply.

Hypertable

An open-source implementation of Google’s bigtable. Hypertable uses novel methods such as Bloom filters to significantly decrease query times, as well as smart messaging to distribute a database across many nodes. It is also non-relational.

Creating and supporting Free Software in Africa

A group of CS professors hailing from Africa have gotten together to create a community that fosters creativity and innovation from people in Africa. People in first-world countries can participate by acting as mentors, or directly contribute to the projects involved. Chisimba is an open-source MVC framework for rapid application development. I am very interested in contributing to this project.

LucidDB

I thought going in that this would be somehow in the same ballpark as Hypertable and CouchDB, but I was disappointed. Basically, they are using compression and some fairly neat indexing to speed up traditional database queries. The main problem is that they only have a Java API, which completely turned me off after 30 minutes. Before that, it seemed like they were getting some pretty promising results. If they add some more APIs in the future, this may be another one to take a look at.

A History of Failure

An awesome talk by Paul Fenwick from Australia, generally detailing failures in computer science and engineering going back into the 20th century and even back to Roman times. This was a wonderful presentation – he’s a really good speaker – and it poked a lot of fun at New Zealand.

All in all, I must say that this OSCON is much better than last year’s at least according to what I was looking for in the sessions. The exhibit hall is also very good this year – I’m pretty loaded down with swag at the moment.

I know someone who would have gotten a kick out of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy! had they been here. He needs to come next year (you know who you are..)

Tonight, I also attended FOSCON 4: Cooking with Ruby. This was a spectacular event hosted by Cubespace. I have to say that the live coding competition was a great spectacle, and held everyone’s attention for hours. It was an epic battle between Symfony, Rails, Smalltalk/Seaside, and Drupal. The rankings ended up being the following:

1. Rails
2. Drupal
3. Symfony
4. Smalltalk/Seaside

The presentations were good as well for the most part (notes here). AND THEY HAD BEER! I had some of the best keg beer imaginable – I thought it would be crap like you usually get out of a keg, but this was real quality Northwestern hopped pale ale. My cup says Bridgeport Ales, so I’ll have to investigate. If anyone knows the exact beer that was available in the left-side keg tonight, I’d appreciate a comment. I also met some cool people, some of which are all into XMPP and ejabberd. I may have to check all of that out now…

Here’s the epic apology email from THE MAN HIMSELF!:

Hi All,

First of all I just wanted to say I apologize for the emails I sent. As of today I promise to stop the Email marketing campaigns. And I do believe it was a very…very..stupid mistake, this is the result of working late.

Also, I am deeply amazed of how talented you guys are. I mean seriously all this happened in less than 24 hours. I hope this mishap would create a benefit for all of us.

I understand this is fun for a lot of you, however, people are getting angry so if we could keep everything under the google groups that would be most appreciated.

http://groups.google.com/group/pradiptas-rolodex?hl=en

If anyone wants to contact me feel free to contact this new email
pradipta416@gmail.com.

Humbly Sorry,
Pradipta (Max) Archiputra

P.S: this time I used BCC. :)

I’m going to operate on the precondition that you’ve installed Ziya and included it in your controller properly. Do the bar chart example before going any further.

Now, make this function in your controller:

def refresh_chart
  chart = ZIya::Charts::Line.new
  render :text => chart
end

First, I needed to make it so I could still do normal images, but turn on coolness if I want. Here’s the goal I came up with for the grammar:

[![](thumburl.jpg)](imageurl.jpg "Scrolly Text at top" "photoslice")

Here’s the first test, with a single image:

And now a set with a namespace:

I did it by simply modifying the regex and image url parsing function in BlueCloth like so:

  InlineLinkRegex = %r{
    \(            # Literal paren
      [ ]*        # Zero or more spaces
      <?(.+?)>?     # URI = $1
      [ ]*        # Zero or more spaces

      (?:         # title
        ([\"\'])    # Opening quote char = $2
        (.*?)     # Title = $3
        \2        # Matching quote char
      )?          # Title is optional
      [ ]*        # Zero or more spaces
      (?:         # rel
        ([\"\'])    # Opening quote char = $2
        (.*?)     # rel = $5
        \4        # Matching quote char
      )?          # rel is optional
    \)
    }x

    # and later...

        # ...or for an inline style second part
        elsif @scanner.scan( InlineLinkRegex )
          url = @scanner[1]
          title = @scanner[3]
          rel = @scanner[5]
          @log.debug "  Found an inline link to %p" % url

          text += %{<a href="%s"} % escape_md( url )
          if title
            title.gsub!( /"/, "&quot;" )
            text += %{ title="%s"} % escape_md( title )
          end
          if rel
            rel.gsub!( /"/, "&quot;" )
            text += %{ rel="%s"} % escape_md( rel )
          end

I also added the following to my Mephisto theme layout, in the head section:

   <!-- Photoslice -->
   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/javascripts/photoslice/style.css" />
   {{ "photoslice/functions.js" | javascript }}

Once again, Ruby is awesome. And so is Markdown.

Code: HALLOWEEN2007

OK – I’m usually pretty critical in general, but this is the best hosting I’ve ever found, and it’s 3 times better than when I bought it, and it’s still the same price! So, you should click the image above and go sign up. These guys give you great support – I’ve contacted them numerous times and always had my problem solved within just a few minutes. I’ve noticed my site down once, and as soon as I emailed them, it was back up again. This blog is running Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails application, and it’s FAST! I barely ever see the kind of quick response from websites like I see from mine.

Features

• Full Ruby on Rails support. They have updated gems for you to use, but also allow you to keep your own gem repository in your home directory.
• Ready-to-go web applications with one-click installs
• Awesome tech support
• Very extensive wiki and forum where you can find out how to do anything you want with your account
• 165GB of storage!
• 5TB of bandwidth per month – which is great for transferring large files. I’ve never had a problem with the transfer speed, either.
• 165 domain pointers – This allows me to host all my domains with them. They have a great system for buying domains that I’ve used quite a bit too.
• Shell access
• Free setup!
• 60-day money back guarantee – If you don’t like it, you get all your bones back. How cool is that?

Benchmark

I have 16Mbit internet at home, and I decided just now to test the bandwidth of my site. Here are the results:

hank@rofl:/tmp$ wget -O /dev/null http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
--00:50:57--  http://ralree.info/videos/grad.mp4
           => `/dev/null'
Resolving ralree.info... 70.47.124.108
Connecting to ralree.info|70.47.124.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 63,744,460 (61M) [audio/mp4]

100%[====================================>] 63,744,460     1.92M/s    ETA 00:00

00:51:30 (1.86 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [63744460/63744460]

Yes, folks, thats 1.86 MEGABYTES per second.

My Maximum at 16Mbit is 2 Megabytes/second, meaning this completely maxed out my connection.

I used to be a Dreamhost customer, and it sucked. It sucked really bad. I’m so glad I switched. Compare the features to any other plan you can find for $5/month. This is as good as it gets.

It’s as simple as this:

<macro:flash>/assets/2007/8/13/party.flv</macro:flash>

Or, you can make it complicated:

<macro:flash width="640" height="480">/assets/2007/8/13/party.flv</macro:flash>

Which ends up like this:

Installation

Install it from your mephisto directory:

./script/plugin install -x https://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/repos/hank/code/rails/mephisto/filtered_column_flash_video

Voila! Firebreathing!

In Ubuntu, I did this:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev quilt klone klone-package

Then, I made a new test project:

make-klone-project create -p myhello

This creates a new project directory. Now, go into it and make it your new home:

cd myhello-0.1/
cd userdata/
mkdir www etc
vim etc/kloned.conf

I’m just going to assume you’re using vim because, well, you should be. Make the config file look something like this:

server_list my_http
allow_root yes

my_http
{
    type      http
    addr.type IPv4
    addr.port 8880
    dir_root  /www
}

Now lets give it something to work with (note we’re still in userdata):

vim www/index.klone

<html>
<head><title>Hello Lady!</title></head>
<body>
  <%  io_printf(out, "Hey, Lady!  You call him Dr. Jones!");  %>
</body>
</html>

Now add your precious files to the sauce:

cd ../../site/
klone -c import ../userdata/
# 2 dirs and 2 files imported
cd ..

Now, compile and run it:

kloned-build -o myapp userdata
./myapp -F  # This runs it in non-daemonized mode

If you don’t get any errors, congratulations. That means I did something right.

Now, just hop over to here or wherever you specified it to run, and it will magically appear.

Now you can do this:

<html>
<head><title>Hello World</title></head>
<body>
<%
int i;
for(i=0; i < 10; ++i) {
    io_printf(out, "Hello Lady! %d<br />", i);
}
%>
</body>
</html>

Then run this to rebuild and re-run the server:

kloned-build -o myapp userdata && ./myapp -F

Update

So, I ran some tests, and I have to say, the speed increase from C might be really awesome every now and again. Here’s the code:

   clock_t curtime = clock();
   #define SEED 35791246
   int niter=10000000;
   double x,y;
   int count=0; /* # of points in the 1st quadrant of unit circle */
   double z;
   double pi;

   /* initialize random numbers */
   srand(SEED);
   count=0;
   for ( i=0; i<niter; i++) {
      x = (double)rand()/RAND_MAX;
      y = (double)rand()/RAND_MAX;
      z = x*x+y*y;
      if (z<=1) count++;
      }
   pi=(double)count/niter*4;
   io_printf(out, "# of trials= %d , estimate of pi is %g \n",niter,pi);
   io_printf(out, "%f", (double)(clock() - curtime)/(double)CLOCKS_PER_SEC);

All this is is a Monte Carlo method of calculating pi that I stole from here. It takes 0.56 seconds of CPU time on my Core 2 Duo @ 3.3Ghz. Now for the Ruby on Rails test:

# Controller
    @start = Time.now
    srand(35791246)
    iter = 10000000
    count = 0
    0.upto(iter) do |i|
      x = rand().to_f
      y = rand().to_f
      z = x*x+y*y
      count += 1 if z <= 1
    end
    @pi = count.to_f / iter * 4
    @end = Time.now

This finishes in 20.75 seconds (about 40x slower). C is great for things like this. I hope to use KLone in the future for these kinds of tasks.

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>> s = Site.find_first
=> #<Site:0xb747e014 @attributes={"current_theme_path"=>"wibbish-mephisto",#...
#...
>> s.host='www.ralree.info'
=> "www.ralree.info"
>> s.save
=> true
>> quit

Next, I did a small model modification:

# app/models/article.rb, in the public section
  def full_external_link
    ["http://", site.host, full_permalink].join("")
  end

And a slight test:

Loading production environment.
>> Article.find_first.full_external_link
=> "http://www.ralree.info/2006/5/21/first-post-what-to-say"

Perfect!

Then, I just modified the view for the email a bit:

# vendor/plugins/mephisto_comment_notification/lib/views/
# comment_notifier/comment_notification.rhtml
A new comment has been posted on your blog for the article '<%= @comment.article.title %>' by <%= @comment.author %> (<%= @comment.author_email %>):
<%= @comment.article.full_external_link %>

The commenter IP address is <%= @comment.author_ip %>.

Here is the comment that was posted:

"<%= @comment.body %>"

This notification was sent using the Mephisto Comment notification plugin by Luke Redpath.

http://opensource.agileevolved.com/svn/root/rails_plugins/mephisto_comment_notification/trunk

Modified awesomely by Erik Gregg (http://www.ralree.info)

And it’s magic! It totally works!