Coding Horror on MVC

Coding Horror has a nice article on Understanding Model-View-Controller. Well worth the read for people not so up on it like myself.

A Merb Tutorial

Nice simple chat wall Merb tutorial, giving you a full demo from start to finish using Merb, a Ruby on Rails type web framework.

Rails 2.0 Performance

There's been some benchmarking doing a Performance comparison: Rails 1.2.6 vs 2.0.2. According to the blog entry rails 2.0 gives about a 30-50% speed increase. Good to see that things are getting faster as they mature!

Rails 2.0 Step By Step

Interesting looking set of articles on Rails 2.0 and Scaffolding Step by Step. So far there are 2 parts of fairly in depth and well written information about Ruby on Rails 2.0.

Super Fast Bulk Data Import in Rails

Via the rails envy podcast I found Super-fast bulk data imports in Rails with ar-extensions. Basically a scaling issue is that importing a billion records into rails via ActiveRecord sucks, this lets you do bulk imports and makes them much faster.

Rails Rant from Mongrel Developer

Rails Is A Ghetto is a potentially explosive rant from the Mongrel (a Ruby/Rails webserver) developer, slamming a lot of the rails people out there. Interesting to see what (if anything) this turns into.

Rails 2.0 Screencasts

Just a quick nod to Akita on Rails for his Rails 2.0 Screencast and tutorial part 1 and part 2.

He commented on my original "Rails 2.0 is out" story with them and from what I've seen it's good stuff, so I wanted to give some more exposure.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 Released

Rails 2.0: It's done! proclaims the RoR blog. Good job guys! Looking forward to playing with the new stuff.

Which Is the Faster Interpreter For Webapps?

Phil Hofsetter goes to some lengths to figure out mod_php, LightTPD, FastCGI - What's fastest?

When You Push the Operating System Limits....

Nice post by Raymond Chen about pushing operating system limits, in saying that if you're pushing the OS limits, nesting things 255 levels deep, or adding more than 65k objects on a form, you're probably needing a bit of redesign. Definitely a good point, though he does not that that is a big 'probably' as I'm sure there are cases where programmers are needlessly hindered by random OS limits.

Case in point, a story from back in the day.

When I first embarked into the IT world I was doing tech support for the Real Estate board, and eventually a bit of programming. This programming was done in a basic-type language whose name I don't remember, and it was used to do screen scraping and data manipulation from a dial up program (ie: call in, do a search, get the results, format them, output to a file for upload to a different system).

One day they wanted me to move from the text based language to a different system, again, similar but slightly different. Many times I really needed to compare code from one program and use it in another... a simple operation these days, and it's pretty common to compare two source files at a time. In this system, instead of a nice system where you could open the code in notepad (or edit at the time), it was:

1. Binary format (no opening in edit)
   
2. The editor couldn't open more than one source file at a time
   
3. The program couldn't be open more than one time (to open multiple versions and therefor, multiple source files)
   
4. IIRC there was something wonky with the cut and paste (no copying to a text file to compare later).
   

Honestly, it really felt like they were doing as much as possible to ensure that people didn't use the system for programming. As I recall, I didn't do much programming in that program/language.

Granted, that's not an OS limit, but a application limit :)

Rails 2.0 Preview

The Ruby on Rails weblog has a nice look at the Rails 2.0: Preview Release. Sadly no quick list of new stuff, nothing I can summarize easily anyway.

Scalable Rails Apps Presentation

A good presentation on writing scalable rails apps from RailsConf in Berlin.

Nice Ruby / Rails Tutorial

Kevin Rose found a nice tutorial on Starting Ruby on Rails. Much nicer than some of the other ones out there, quick and to the point and oriented towards other programmers.

Wii Controlled Source Control

Hows this for making source control more fun for programmers? Check out this video of a Wii controlling Plastic SCM.

Filling Forms Automatically in HTML::Mason

I seem to be the only person programming in HTML::Mason anymore, so this link about Filters And HTML Fill In Form, showing how to use HTML::FillInForm to automatically for checking / filling in the values. Different way than the way I do it, so good to know.

Better Coding

Some good stuff on ways to write more comprehensible code.

Automatic Staging Server with CVS

Found on planet gnome is a howto on Creating An Automated Staging Server using CVS.

It’s easy to create an automated staging server for content that doesn’t need to be compiled (like most web content.) The trick is that CVS has a very flexible logging system. All you need to do is have your CVS server send an email on each check in and have the staging server take that email and check out the files that changed.

Details follow in the link.

Code a Raytracer in a weekend?

This guy is a machine, coding a raytracer over 48 hours on a weekend... he called it PixelMachine and has a full log (with pretty pictures) of progress starting Saturday the 17th and ending Sunday the 18th.....

Vim Input for Visual Studio

This is cool, ViEmu/VS: vi-vim editor emulation for Microsoft Visual Studio. Basically looks like it allows you to use the vi modal model for visual studio editing. This might make me go and check out MSVS again (sorry Microsoft, but my fingers only seem to know how to do vi editing while programming)....

JS Client Side Table Sorting / Filtering

While I'm not a really big fan of JS, I am a huge fan of pre-made systems that easily plug into existing code and solve problems, say, easy and quick Table Sorting, Filtering, Etc. This solution from JavascriptToolbox has some really nice features. The only thing I don't see (yet, I might have just missed it) is a combination of sorting and paging.

Still, definitely something to plug into my next web project.

Math For Programmers

A nice post on Math For Programmers. Finally justification that algerbra in school really was torture! Via jwz.

More GNOME / Mono Optimization

Aaron Bockover writes up a cool entry on Cracking down on heap abuse in Mono, telling how he did optimization work in TagLib-Sharp (a mono library for MP3 tagging) and moved memory allocation down from (for example) 103mb to 16mb! I honestly don't 100% understand a lot of what is actually going on, but seeing optimization work like this really is cool to me. Keep up the good work!

Your Startup and Ruby on Rails

An interesting and sarcastic (yet funny) article entitled Why your startup should use Ruby on Rails. All good points in there (for those too lazy to RTFA the point is really saying why you shouldn't use RoR), however I think a similar article could be written about your favorite language or framework. In fact, your favorite language sucks! :)

For anyone who has looked at RoR or Catalyst or any of the newer frameworks web frameworks available out there it's an interesting read. Amazingly the comments to the story haven't devolved into a flamewar yet. We can still hope though!

OpenSceneGraph Open Source 3D Toolkit Oohhhh...... OpenSceneGraph is pretty swanky. Boone pointed it out this morning, it runs on most every OS, uses OpenGL, and looks pretty good too.

Perl Filtering with Bloom Hat tip to random($foo) for his pointer to perl.com's article on Using Bloom Filters. Basically a much less expensive way of using a hash for doing existance lookups on large amounts of data.

Vim For Perl Developers Title pretty much says it all. random($foo) pointed out Vim for Perl developers with some good tips and tricks that apply pretty well to perl and other languages as well.

W2K Source Code Review K5 has an article with a quick look at the Win2k source. The author notes on the quality, style, comments, undocumented messages and features used by various MS applications, and potential risks of the code being out in the wild (already released exploits aside :)

CSS Debugging Cool, codepoetry has a CSS Debugging Stylesheet that looks like it'll be handy when I finally redesign things. Any day now. Honest.

OO Is Not the Be-All and End-All Interesting discussion of OOP over the top is a bad and scary thing. The article that prompted this might have been a joke (hard to tell, it seems serious enough), but it's still an interesting read as I wouldn't doubt that this has happened at some point.

Cost Of Embedded Projects A Microsoft funded survey found that Linux was more expensive than Microsoft for embedded development (so spake the the reg). I'm am shocked by this, just shocked....

Postgresql Interview Interesting Interview with the PostgreSQL Team on OSNews, lots of notes on what is to come.

Pair Programming Via Screen Some good suggestions from /. on using screen for pair programming. I didn't realize that screen could do this... definately helps if you want to pair program and don't have desks that allow two people to be close enough to the keyboard... Silv, Engel, and Foz will be interested in this. The original topic of this (Hydra) is cool too.

BeOS Filesystem Overview Pretty neat look at the design of the BeOS filesystem. Part of a larger series from a while back entitled Tales of a BeOS Refugee. Neat stuff. Anyone know if BeOS is atill around anywhere, or available to play with?

Why Not to Use Microsoft Visual Source Safe Related to a rant I posted on my own site a while back about the lack of decent Version Control for the Microsoft world, I found an interesting article entitled Visual SourceSafe: Microsoft's Source Destruction System. I've heard some stories about VSS from someone who worked with it, and it had me both laughing out loud and shuddering.

QT vs. MFC Programming Phil, of freehackers.org has written a nice article on his experiences with programming in MFC vs Qt. A bit biased of course, coming from a site devoted to QT and KDE programs, but interesting nontheless.

What Platform to use for a MySQL server Jeremy Zawodny's blog has a good little writeup entitled FreeBSD or Linux for your MySQL Server? A good read.

VB Love Did I say "love"? Damn, I meant "loath"! Thanks to Brad for passing on an article on Thirteen Ways to Loathe VB.

What Java Needs Via a /. story comes 10 Reasons We Need Java 3.0. The comments on the story are good too :) Any comments from the java programmers out there?

C++ Tips and Tricks K5 has a great article detailing some c++ bag of tricks. In there are some tools and programs that will make your c++ programming (and some work for just C as well of course) faster and quicker (or at least better :)