Life is grand

(slides)
Thomas is the author of script.aculo.us so he knows a little bit about JavaScript.

Script.aculo.us has a unit testing framework plugin for Rails (javascript_test plugin.) Outputs nice views. All the usual assertions and some simple benchmarking. Comes with a generator to get you up and running fast. Running multiple tests is done via rake and with multiple browsers, nice. No code coverage metrics. RJS not supported either.

He recommends good old FireBug for JS debugging. Hurrah. Venkman is still useful though thanks to its profiling feature he mentions. Webkit and Drosera for Safari and Microsoft Script Debugger for Internet Explorer.

A very boring speaker but he knows his stuff.

At the evening Q&A session now. You know we are amongst geeks when an evening session is fully attended. See you all in the morning.

And into Jason Hoffman’s talk on systems administration and Rails. Deployment, hosting, power, databases etc.

Strongspace, a Rails app from Joyent, is at 60terabytes. Joyent does TextDrive remember so they know some things. BTW Jason is from Joyent.

Rails is just a small part of your entire system. You need a lot more than just a sorted Rails config to have a well served app.

Virtualisation is the real only way. Xen, VMWare (if you must) or Solaris Zones.

Jason is not enamoured with Linux; “If I could turn Linux into a clever way of saying ‘crashes everyday and doesn’t tell you why’, I would.”

WordPress, half a million users, uses DNS load balancing. Works pretty well.

Joyent chooses:
- Console is Lantronix
- Sun Fire AMD servers, T1000, X4100 etc.
- Opteron 285 and TI SPARC
- 2GB RAM
- Sen Fire X5400 storage
- 500GB SATA discs
- Solaris Nevada OS
- Gigabit with cat6 cables

DTrace is getting Ruby integration so you can write performance tests to find out what exactly is going wrong. DTrace is from Solaris and also ported to Mac OS X in Leopard via XRay in XCode.

Key concepts:
- virtualise
- seperate hardware comp. (db from procesing from storage)
- KISS
- stoichiometry (from chemistry, the practice of adding up. If you can’t just add on another server then you have problems.)
- config management and distributed control
- pool and split i.e. SOA
- Understand what is maximum to understand what should be happening vs. what is (potential)

I’ve asked Jason for the slides to this talk and will post them later.

Excellent talk from Jason.
- DNS and federation

Three talks in and it is going fairly well. Soren Burkhart talk was billed as how they used Rails to revolutionise the airline industry. Untortunatley he spent too much time on the preliminaries and had to rush through the meat of his talk (the app and its development.) It looked interesting but we didn’t get into much detail. Might be worth contacting him directly to get some info.

James Cox’s talk on Rails performance and scaling (pdf) was pretty good. A chunk of my notes from it:

- columns => :select, pagination => :limit, :offset)
- @var ||= query
- MySQL is decent
- Memcache (doesn’t have to be on the same machine)
- mysql \s
- mysql - log slow queries - mysql_slow_queries
- nginx (russian but fast)
- mongrel for scaling even if it isn’t the fastest
- hostname lookup in apache2 bad

Matt Kent and Kyle Shank gave a demo of his RadRails IDE which seems to have come a long way from what I initially used. Auto-completion they want to do but apparently is a difficult feature.They are also working on porting TextMate Ruby snippets to RadRails. Certainly more featurefull than RIDE-ME at this stage. Autotest is a nifty way to run certain (or all) tests in the background on an interval or on save.

So far every talker has been young and inexperienced. Really smart but these aren’t slick conference speakers like you get at Java and Microsoft events. This is a good and bad thing. Good as you get low level info, bad because they can wander and be unprepared for the talk.

At RailsConf Europe 2006. Good turn out and location.

David’s keynote was very technical. He mentioned a revamping of the views (codenamed simply helpful, currently a plugin) and how ActiveResource probably won’t be in Rails 2.0.

Kathy Sierra’s talk was really good. All about passion and emotion in our products. Talk to the brain, not the mind i.e. go for the caveman in all of us rather than our abstracted logical sides. To a degree of course.

I just booked my place at the European Ruby on Rails conference being held on the 14th and 15th of September in London. If you are going drop me a line.

I managed to score an Electric Picnic ticket. Three days of bands, camping and craziness starting on the 1st of September. Highlights for me are Massive Attack, Mogwai, Groove Armada, New Order, Bloc Party, Belle & Sebastian, Super Furry Animals, Broken Social Scene, Basement Jaxx, Pet Shop Boys and The Blue Nile.

Should be a blast. Give me a yell if you are heading that way.

Tom Corcoran contacted me yesterday and mentioned that he’d be happy to offer the TSSG or WIT facilities as a venue for BarCamp Ireland.

I work at the TSSG building and it is a lovely location with a great boardroom and other meeting rooms. WIT is also a good venue.

I have updated the BarCamp page but thought I’d mention it here too so that it is noticed.

I am off to the Sea Fair Haven 2006 in Wales for four days. Won’t have email or net access so this will be the last post for awhile and I won’t be able to handle email (anything important text me on +353 86 896 8944.) I bought a Vango Delta 200 tent and a Vango Ultralight II 900 sleeping bag, I’ll report on how they faired.

So till Tuesday morn’ when I’ll be bringing back a hangover, blistered hands, bruised shins, lots of photos and a big grin. Enjoy the weekend all.

How does one associate more than one email address with a Google Calendar? Can you?

The boss sent me a Google Calendar meeting request but sent it to my pwatson@tssg.org email account. However I am registered with paulmwatson@gmail.com on GCal. So when I try and accept the meeting request Google does not tie it up to my main calendar but instead asks me to register a new Google account.

All a bit confusing. I’d like for GCal to simply add to one calendar any meeting requests sent to a range of email addresses I control.

I’ll be in Pembrokeshire, Wales next weekend, 23rd to the 26th of June 2006, for the Sea Fair Haven boat festival. An Seabhac Mara will be there with the rest of the crew. If you are in the area then drop in and say hello.