Category Archives: Technology

WebSockets that Reconnect

Here is a JavaScript sample of a WebSocket that will try to reconnect every second if the connection is lost to the server. This is completely transparent to the end-user. function WS() { var _self = this; this.start = function() … Continue reading

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Passenger and ruby-oci8 (Oracle)

Oracle is going to drive a man to drink.  After getting our rake migrations to run with this solution, our application had issues.  We run our Rails app in Passenger + Apache2.  After we deployed, we got this error: ERROR: … Continue reading

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RabbitMQ on OS X via MacPorts

MacPorts installs an old version of RabbitMQ. To get the latest, you need to add the RabbitMQ repository as described here: http://www.rabbitmq.com/macports.html However, when you try and install it, it throws the following error: $ sudo port install rabbitmq-server Error: … Continue reading

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Hot Potato – A Real-time Processing Framework

Today, I am happy to announce the availability of HotPotato.  Hot Potato is an open source real-time processing framework written in Ruby. Originally designed to process the Twitter firehose at 3,000+ tweets per second, it has been extended to support … Continue reading

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Signal Handling

A signal is a way to notify a process of an event from another process. A signal handler allows one execute code when a signal is received. For example, the most common signal sent from the command-line is SIGINT via … Continue reading

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EventMachine Process Control

A while ago I wrote a pilot project for a real-time twitter analysis tool using eventmachine and websockets. It worked perfectly, but there were questions how to deploy it to production. Specifically, how to handle process management, logging, configuration, deployment, … Continue reading

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Efficient Real-Time Memory De-duplication

De-duplication is the process of removing duplicates from a collection. Hashes and bloom filters are common tools to use when implementing de-duplication, however, there are times when these are not fast enough. It is fairly simple to implement a memory … Continue reading

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Sinaglo – A Sinatra-based Blog backed by MongoDB

I will say, I love the simplicity of Sinatra and MongoDB and Sinaglo is a great way to demonstrate Sinatra and MongoDB working together for a semi-useful application. Sinaglo is everything you need and nothing you don’t. This started out as a project … Continue reading

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Realtime Log Visualization

Erlend Simonsen put out a program called gltail that creates a graphical representation of your log files. I saw this a long time ago, but last night I finally started playing with it. It works quite well. I needed to … Continue reading

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New Twitter Account

So as I mentioned earlier, I no longer show up in Twitter results.  I tried to get it fixed, but it’s not worth my time anymore.  I created another Twitter account with the same username.  The old account was renamed.  … Continue reading

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