hwatkins

%%% File    : recomendations.erl
%%% Author  : Russell Brown <russell@pango.lan>
%%% Description : The first chapter of Programming Collective Inteligence, but in elrang, like.
%%% Created : 15 Jun 2009 by Russell Brown <russell@pango.lan>

-module(recomendations).

-compile(export_all).

%%

hwatkins

module Main where

import Network.Socket
import System.Environment
import Control.Concurrent
import Control.Monad

-- Port number to listen on
listenPort :: PortNumber
listenPort = 3000

hwatkins

How great is named_scope?
Dave » 12 December 2008 » In Technology » 3 Comments

If you haven’t used named_scope in Rails 2.1+ yet, I suggest you learn about it ASAP. Prior versions of Rails had a plugin that could perform similar functions, but it’s nice to have it part of the core system.

What does it do?

It does just what it says. It gives you a way to utilize the power of with_scope but name it. The best way to show it is with an example.

Let’s say you have a user model. Users have a gender attribute and a activated flag. When operating on your user object, you could sprinkle your code with something like:

hwatkins

Ruby Background Tasks with Starling
Dave » 25 March 2008 » In Technology »

At Inquisix, we help sales professionals exchange trusted referrals. To do that requires several background tasks, some that could take 10-15 minutes to process. Obviously, I can’t make a client wait for that, so I needed a system that could handle background tasks. At first, I started with backgroundrb, and it worked just fine. Backgroundrb was in production for two months while Inquisix grew. However, there were a few things about backgroundrb that bothered me:

It uses a lot of memory. Every worker creates at least one process. Plus, there is a master process to watch everything and deal with communication. It doesn’t take much before you end up with 5-6 processes. I had to upgrade my test server just to deal with the extra memory requirements.
It’s not easy to build a queue with control over threads without creating a ton of processes.
Too many times, I wanted to do something pretty straight forward, but I had to dig throug

hwatkins

More Asynchronous Processing
Dave » 04 November 2008 » In Technology »

In a previous series on using workling and starling for asychronous processing, I described how to setup background tasks. Here is a quick way to use this for emails without a lot of changes to your application.

First, create lib/asynch_mail.rb:

# Makes an actionmailer class queue its emails into a workling queue
# instead of sending them sycnhronously
#

hwatkins

require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'
require 'hpricot'

site="www.twitpic.com"
# Grab the highest picture number
agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari'
page = agent.get("http://#{site}/public_timeline")
doc = Hpricot(page.body)