Joel and Ruby performance

Joel of Joel on Software fame has bashed Ruby performance on his blog. The outcry caused by this flamebait has been large as expected. Yet, out of the gut (without any benchmarks to back up my feelings) I thought he was probably right that Ruby is small.

However, I found an interesting comment on the Smallthought blog: the author points out that Ruby's performance is slowed down by a naive implementation of the interpreter and points to a Smalltalk interpreter just OSSed by Sun. Now, if we combine this and Sun hiring the JRuny guys there is cause for hope to get a better Ruby interpreter in a short while.

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Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan

The misuse of the term "RESTful" in the Rails community

Today I went to a talk at the local Ruby on Rails group. The speaker was quite clueful. He had even implemented his own DSL to describe his business problem. Obviously, the guy was not a noobie in Ruby. However, what really turned me off was his usage of the word "RESTful". For him, it seemed to be a way to describe the inner workings of his application, like, say, "separation of concerns". RoR guys are generally not the most clueless people, but nobody in the audience challenged him about this. It seemed to be the generally accepted usage of the term in the Rails community. This made me think that DHH and Rails have done two things to REST: First, they greatly help to evangelize the term "RESTful" Second, they hijacked the meaning of the term and changed it from "architectural style" to "application architecture" As it happens I listened to a podcast from the Pragmatic Programmers on my way home. It was about the .Net Ruby implementati

What is Multi-Tenancy? A closer look

Lately, I had a lot of conversations about multi-tenancy (MT). So I finally wrote up my thoughts on that term. In this post I will argue that MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable. Therefore, any statement about a system being “MT” can only be made in the context of the given requirements. It is not a property of the system itself . I will also show that perfect multi-tenancy is indistinguishable from single-tenancy (ST). MT is a value that depends on a continuous variable Imagine a step-function "ST-MT" (values are either 0 or 1) that determines if a given system is MT (1) or ST (0). That function will look like this: ST-MT = function (system, business requirements) Look at the function’s arguments: the first one is obvious – the result will depend on the system itself. The second one is more interesting: it is the cumulative set of business requirements . Typically, these requirements will include: Resource sharing: systems typically declare

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