I have an argument against free will called The Two-lever Argument. There are many definitions of free will, so we should start with one before proceeding: free will The ability to have willfully chosen otherwise for any previous decision. The Two-lever Argument says that there are only two ways to influence future events (and thus have free will):…
Updated Ruby Code for Querying IpInfoDB
This version adds two main features: avoids barfing if the array size is zero when appending to the query string sends the web service 25 queries at a time instead of one speed: it’ll do about 3000 resolutions per minute now require ‘rubygems’ require ‘hpricot’ require ‘open-uri’ ips = [] file = File.open(‘/Users/daniel/Development/newfile’, ‘w’) File.open(‘/Users/daniel/Development/ips3’).each { |line| ips.push…
Ruby Is Slow, and Rails Doesn’t Scale Well
When this talk comes from a Twitter developer, who loves both Ruby and Rails and happen to be running probably the most punished RoR site on the Internet right now, I’m inclined to believe. (they’re taking over 11,000 requests per second during peak times). Here are a few quotes from the interview: Once you hit a certain threshold…
Why I Love Ruby
If you’re looking for a comprehensive comparison of 15 programming languages based on decades of experience, this isn’t it. I’m a hobbiest programmer. Most of my “programs” are either in bash or Python, fit on one page, and are based firmly in laziness. But I do know beauty when I see it, and Ruby is beautiful. In this…
Getting Into Ruby
I feel like I’m the last person in the world to do this. Up until now I’ve pretty much chosen Python as my “Perlesque” language of choice, and I never had much of a will to dabble in what seemed to be nothing more than a slightly better Python. But I changed my mind. After spending some time…