Christopher Spring

jRuby: The best of both worlds

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:39:25 +0200

jRuby: The best of both worlds

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EventMachine for RubyFuZa 2012 View more presentations from Christopher Spring

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:53:00 +0200

EventMachine for RubyFuZa 2012

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Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:55:38 +0300

Ruby Concurrency and EventMachine View more presentations from Christopher Spring

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 16:10:24 +0300

Ruby Concurrency and EventMachine

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"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world..."

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 17:26:19 +0300

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

- http://quotevadis.com/post/4046940916/impossible-is-nothing

RubyOnBeer Ohm presentation

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:35:27 +0200

Ohm

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Did a presentation at last night’s RubyOnBeer meetup. Went to Higher Ground at Saints - really cool venue.

Redis, Resque & Friends

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:09:21 +0200

I recently did a presentation at the RubyFuZa 2011 ruby conference down in Cape Town. Cant wait for RubyFuZa 2012 :)

Check out the slides and let me know what you think.

Redis, Resque & Friends

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Retry and clear failed Resque jobs

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:43:00 +0200

This is for posterity’s sake :)

Retry all jobs:

(Resque::Failure.count-1).downto(0).each { |i| 
  Resque::Failure.requeue(i)
}

Retry jobs for a particular worker:

(Resque::Failure.count-1).downto(0).each { |i|
  payload_class = Resque::Failure.all(i)['payload']['class'] 
  Resque::Failure.requeue(i) if payload_class == 'MyWorker' 
}

Clear failed jobs:

Resque::Failure.clear

You get the idea :P

Performing Disk Repairs on OSX without Install Disk

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:19:56 +0200

I dont travel with my OSX install disk (seriously, who does?) and found myself in a situation where i needed to repair my macbook pro’s hard drive using said installation disk.

There are two options if you find yourself in a similar position:

Start in safe mode: Hold shift down during start up (performs a simple disk scan)
Start in single user mode and run fsck: hold down command+s during start up and run the following command in the terminal prompt when ready: /sbin/fsck -fy

You’ll find more details on this apple support page

Really beautiful time of year in Johannesburg at the moment: I...

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:51:33 +0200

Really beautiful time of year in Johannesburg at the moment: I <3 Jacaranda Trees

Not just code, but yoga too

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:43:15 +0200

Not just code, but yoga too:

I’m a qualified yoga teacher now too - check out my teacher profile in the link above :)

Engine Yard have started a new project, Rails Dispatch with info...

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:29:00 +0300

Engine Yard have started a new project, Rails Dispatch with info about the upcoming Rails 3 release. They’ve also done an updated version of the famous “Blog in 15 minutes” screencast - see above.

All my backups are the same size?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:04:04 +0200

I recently noticed that the database backups of an app. that i maintain were the same size for a couple of days.

Now, all the backups are done from a MySQL slave database, so it didn’t take too long for me to work out that my slave had died; running “show slave status\G” yielded something like this:

    ....
    Slave_IO_Running: Yes
    Slave_SQL_Running: No
    ....
    Seconds_Behind_Master: NULL

The trick here ended up being the following short little routine (after ascertaining that the error was not that serious - check syslog etc).

While in the mysql prompt, issue the following

    STOP SLAVE;
    SET GLOBAL SQL_SLAVE_SKIP_COUNTER = 1;
    START SLAVE;
    SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G

And if everything went according to plan, running “show slave status\G” should now yield:

    ....
    Slave_IO_Running: Yes
    Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
    ....
    Seconds_Behind_Master: [a few seconds]

TorqueBox

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:32:00 +0200

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Looks like a great Ruby app server package. I will definitely be giving it a swirl!

Sometimes you just have to see the humour in life.

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:09:41 +0300

Sometimes you just have to see the humour in life.

I’m a huge HAML fan, but not so much a SASS one. LESS is a...

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:06:33 +0300

I’m a huge HAML fan, but not so much a SASS one. LESS is a nice alternative for creating leaner and more maintainable CSS - worth checking out.

Light-weight jQuery UI library by the flowplayer guys -...

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:54:49 +0300

Light-weight jQuery UI library by the flowplayer guys - I’m very impressed with it!

Cheaper to fly to NY and buy a Macbook Pro?!?!?

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:38:00 +0300

I was a little surprised recently when i priced buying a new 17” Macbook Pro from local South African Mac suppliers. I discovered that it was cheaper to buy a return ticket to NY and buy the machine there, than it currently is to buy it here in South Africa.

Here are the numbers for flying to New York:

R8,909.00 -> Return flight from Johannesburg to JFK in New York
R23,791.50 -> Apple.com price for 17” Macbook Pro: $2,799.00 x R8.50/$
R32,700.50 -> Total

You can have a look at a screenshot of the flight details i “booked” with SAA here.

The numbers for a local purchase:

R32,999.00 -> 17” Macbook Pro through digicape.co.za
R32,999.00 -> 17” Macbook Pro through zastore.co.za

At the time of writing this post the Rand Dollar exchange rate as reported by XE.com was R8.16 per US Dollar, but you’ll notice that i modified that to R8.50 above for the calculations.

So, am i the only who feels that maybe, just maybe, the South African population is being royally ripped off?

Merb web service with Shoes GUI

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:20:53 +0300

Every couple of months I play around with shoes to try and solve some basic prototyping needs that arise at work.

This time round i stumbled onto a nice O’Reilly tutorial that shows you how to setup a basic merb web service and interact with it using shoes. Well worth checking out.

BuddyPress 404 errors on Blogs, Members, Groups

Sun, 24 May 2009 11:09:59 +0300

I ran into a bit of an issue trying to get BuddyPress setup on my Mac (Tiger, if you must know) - clicking on Blog, Members or Groups would yield a 404.

To fix the problem you need to add the following (in addition to what is explained in the various readme files) directive to your httpd.conf:

<Directory "/path/to/apache/root">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride FileInfo Options
    Allow from all
</Directory>

If you don’t have that in, it looks as if apache ignores the htaccess file in your Wordpress MU root.

Check out this forum thread for more: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/1187