Open Synapse

Clever but slow: Symbol#to_proc

Ever do something like this in a Rails app and think it was really awesome and convenient?

all_content = Post.find(:all).map(&:content)

Symbol#to_proc is really neat but is expensive as heck.

Here’s some sample benchmarks:

                      user     system      total        real
without to_proc   0.840000   0.000000   0.840000 (  0.858780)
with to_proc      1.780000   0.020000   1.800000 (  1.816275)

That means code that looks like this:

(1..100).inject(&:+)

looks really neat but is quite a bit slower than

(1..100).inject {|sum, n| sum + n }

ActiveRecord, your Ruby-Fu may be strong but it’s going to cramp my style.

Design By Humans 20% Off Referral Code + Contest

I got this in my email today so I thought, why not? Use this 20% off referral code and I’ll have a chance to win an iPhone I’ve been coveting for about as long as everyone with one has been mocking me for not having it. The first place winner also wins a MBP but I highly doubt I’ll get that far. I’m fine with Top 5.

Design By Humans 20% Off Referral Code: abhay (Expires July 6 @ midnight)

The super awesome designs that I own:

pollution effect

Must Destroy The City

Memory Ln.

Circular Reasoning

The only unfortunate part of it is that you have to pay tax in CA. Bah!

Firefox 3 Download MIrrors

I haven’t been able to download the new Firefox 3 package all morning so I went hunting for mirrors.

Here’s a direct link for those on Mac and wanting the en-US release: dmg, checksum

There’s a full mirror list where you can get more download links while the mozilla.org site stays up. You can find your platform and language via that list. More examples: linux-i686, win32

Fedora mirrors being wonky

This post is mostly so I remember this myself but when I logged into my VPS this evening and tried to use yum, I got the following silliness

Could not retrieve mirrorlist http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-8&arch=x86_64 error was
[Errno 4] IOError: <urlopen error (-3, 'Temporary failure in name resolution')>
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again

I’m not really sure what’s going on over there but I’m impatient.

I just modified the mirrorlist line in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo

mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?path=pub/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Fedora/$basearch/os

Extra points

If you add country=us, to the mirrorlist url, you’ll get a more restricted repository list.

I think my equivalent would be some sort of computer.

hugehuge:

Recumbent 3 a.m. conversation a few days ago:

She [sincerely and without warning]: I’m attracted to everything about you.  Even the Darth Vader sword hanging on your wall.

Me [thinking]: Oh my god, that’s the sweetest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time.

Me [out loud]: Correction: it’s a lightsaber.