I've got a new phone, courtesy of Cisco... and I find it hard to complain about something that's 'free to me', but this phone is sad.
First, it's got music playback capability. Very cool. It can play MP3s or WMA. But it's got no headphone jack. If you want to listen to your music, you have to buy a bluetooth headset or use the speakerphone speaker. Seriously. This is sad.
Second, it won't sync with my Mac. The Bluetooth will pair (and apparently you can use it as an internet connection see here), but no basic file copy. This is dumb.
So I poke around the net a bit and found the The Missing Sync.
So I get a cool new phone that can take pictures, video, play music, send and receive email... and I have to buy software to copy off my pictures. Oh well... at least it can be done.
Enjoy! From Chad and Marcel's charity workshop on Rails testing to Ezra on Merb to me on C/Ruby/Rails integration, it's all free under the Creative Commons. :)
Hoedown Videos
Alan Hoffler, communication guru likes to say that watching yourself on video is a humbling thing... and he's right. Watching me talk and throw candy for the first five minutes of the talk, I feel obligated to tell everyone that the entire time, my new MacBook Pro was rebooting... and hanging. Watch the blank overhead screen in the background. I suspect it was running a disk check during the boot. But that was the last good boot I got out of the machine! After the talk, it locked up tight and never came back. It's been replaced with a rock solid MacBook Pro, but I feel very fortunate to have been able to finish that talk.
I could've pulled my slides out of Subversion, and the code was there as well, but it would've been interesting to see if I could've done things like install the InlineC gems live in front of the audience. :)
That sort of thing doesn't happen often, but it does make things a bit more interesting. Enjoy the talk, but also enjoy watching me 'sing and dance' while trying to decide if my Mac would actually boot or not.
Your first step to application tuning should always be to measure, then tune. Start with the application, then work your way down.
But when you do start moving down to tune your Rails stack, how do you proceed? This write up does a pretty good job of showing you some great options.
Testing Various Configurations of Rails, Merb, Swiftiply, and Nginx
From memcached to Nginx to evented mogrels, there are some good bits in here. I'm not sure I'm ready to rewrite my Rails app in Merb... but if you don't learn a bit about it, you'll never know if it suits your next app.
Btw, memcached isn't a Ruby/Rails only technology. Check it out for your Java/PHP/etc app as well.
I spoke at the Ruby Hoedown last weekend and had a blast. I didn't get to attend much of the conference due to my travel. However, that talk was the last time my shiny new MacBook Pro would boot!
It had been locking up with an increasing frequency... it locked up when I took it to the front of the room to start speaking. What timing! It took nearly 10 minutes to reboot.... during that time, I got to entertain the audience with just my wit. (Pity the audience.)
Fortunately I had also brought along some candy. I like to throw candy into an audience at random from time to time. It keeps everyone alert and laughing. And on this occasion, it was perfect.
My Choice of Candy
Jared and His Nerds
Every shot of me 'talking' is actually me throwing candy at people. :) Here's one. And here's another.
I've got to admit that a lot of the Ruby Hoedown Flickr shots are people taking pictures of each other... taking pictures of each other... with iPhones. There's some kind of Freudian statement in there... ;)
Back to the MacBook Pro. Cisco had provided me with a brand new, sealed in the box MacBook Pro. The first had a broken FireWire port. This one (my second) had a disk that seems to freeze when the machine gets hot. So I'm on my third! (When you open three MBPs in a week, the packaging loses a bit of it's magic.)
So far the third box seems to be working great. I left it on all night and it's still humming along. Third time's the charm? :)
All this and I have a cold too... I've got several half written blog entries cued up, but I've got to get caught up on other fronts first. Staging your machine three times in two weeks tends to take up all the spare time in my evenings.
