I'm happy to announce the release of libxml-ruby 113 Besides including the usual assortment of new features and bug fixes, this release also includes a speed...

A mere seven years after its inception, libxml-ruby has finally reached version 10 libxml-ruby provides ruby, via the libxml2 libary, the super fast, feature rich xml parser...

One of the great new features of the upcoming postgresql 84 release is the addition of window functions Previously limited to enterprise databases such as Oracle and DB2, they...

Last year I wrote about how to profile your Rails application, which is a lot harder then it seems Its not so much the profiling itself - its easy enough to create one-off...

I'm happy to announce the release of ruby-prof 070, the superfast, open-source, Ruby profiler that helps you find bottlenecks in your Ruby code This release was a joint...

No doubt this post is two weeks past its prime, but better late than never, right On Sunday, October 26th, Yue and I headed downtown to check out Barak Obama's campaign...

Rafting down the Grand Canyon has been on my todo list for a long time Over the years, I've rafted or canoed the James, Potomac, Rappahannock, Shenandoah, Arkansas, Taylor (well...

One of the projects we've been working on for MapBuzz the last few weeks is building an interactive map that shows all the events going on in Denver during the Democratic...

There is general discontent with the state of XML processing in Ruby - see for example here or here An obvious solution is to use libxml However that has been a non-starter...

The web is full of articles discussing how to render transparent 24-bit png images in IE6 - so why write another one Three reasons First, although the long hoped for...

Sooner or later, for most large websites you have to bite the bullet and implement some form of asynchronous processing to deal with long-running tasks For example, with...

Hearing about the latest and greatest Facebook application reminds me of reading FastCompany or Business 20, before it went bust The typical story goes like this - a couple of...

Its a funny thing when things that you wish would happen do happen, but then you realize they aren't so great after all Take for example the change this year in daylight savings...

If there were such a thing as the Ten Commandments of programming, code reuse would surely be included Now you're probably thinking I've lost my mind, because any good...

Update - It turns out that Rails does cache column data dictionary queries (which is what you would expect), but not for :has_and_belongs_to_many associations (HABTMA) I know...

Today I was fixing up some inefficiencies in Rail's Postgresql adapter (more about that in a later post), and came across this strange looking code: def tables(name = nil) ...

Shugo and I are happy to announce the release of ruby-prof 060 If you haven't used ruby-prof, its a superfast, open-source, profiler for Ruby that shows you where your...

A couple of days ago, Alex Dymo from Pluron sent me an email describing some of the great work he has done optimizing the performance of their online project managment software...

Maybe its just me, but what I want from a JavaScript library seems to be diverging from what Prototype provides What I want, in order of importance, is: A cross-browser...

Time for a rant A few years ago I decided it was finally time to learn Linux after having used DOS, Windows, and the Mac OS for years My plan of attack was to run my own...