snax

As some people already know, I'm moving to San Francisco in early September. One thing I had trouble finding was a map of the San Francisco microclimates. But here's one:

It's from this book.

I'll be living on the border of North Beach and Russian Hill (which is in the warm zone, 6). No place in San Francisco is really "hot", despite what that map says. But the patterns of fog and relative coolness are correct.

postscript

Sorry that my blogging and open-source output has been light; I'm recovering from serious RSI problems. The fact that you see this post at all is a sign that things are getting better, though.

August 05, 2008

I just want to go on record saying that none of Twitter's problems have ever been Rails problems.

postscript

Brandon Keene is right on.

July 10, 2008

Echoe 3 is out, right on the heels of Rubygems 1.2. It supports the new runtime vs. development dependencies, and works correctly with the Rubyforge 1.0.0 gem.

It still supports all the usual features like certificate chains, RDoc upload, changeset parsing, manifest building, and cross-packaging. Documentation is here.

By the way, Rubygems 1.2 seems pretty great.

June 22, 2008

Fauna projects are now on GitHub. Go to it.

The Subversion repos are going away, but the gems and forums will remain on RubyForge.

You can also follow Snax/Fauna activity on Twitter.

June 13, 2008

It looks pretty small:

Lots of people claim they are bigger, like Hulu and Scribd. And others have published big traffic numbers: Yellowpages and Friends for Sale.

maths

Let's break it down now, so to speak. First, we're not interested in rank, otherwise known as unique users; we're interested in pageviews. Can we get pageview data out of Compete? We can. First, take the visits per month:...

May 27, 2008

Francis Irving sent me a note about his work on a new Rails search plugin, acts_as_xapian. It uses the Xapian engine, which is a C++ indexer similar to Lucene. A particularly neat feature is built-in spellcheck.

I still plan to benchmark all these plugins on the Wikipedia dataset...it's been delayed by the new job. If anyone has a big piece of iron I could use for a couple weeks I would appreciate it (16GB ram, hundreds of GB of free diskspace, no production load).

May 26, 2008