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2008-04-28
Writing a compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 5

Last time I promised to post these more frequently, and blatantly failed to find the time... In return, I've taken the time to combine what would have been parts 5, 6 and 7, that by themselves would've been annoyingly short. Here goes:

Handle number literals

So far our program have only ...

2008-04-24
Where tagging falls apart

Tobey Maguire has a daughter named Ruby.

How I know? No, I haven't started following celebrity news. But I do regularly skim the Technorati Ruby tag.

Tags suck.

I get lots of what I'm after, namely posts about Ruby development, but I also get a hell of a lot of ...

2008-04-17
Writing a compiler in Ruby bottom up - step 4

Sorry for the long delay since the last part, I've simply been too caught up in other stuff. As the list from last time indicated, this part will cover defining functions and adding support for building a simple "runtime library".

Defining functions

A programming language without either functions or methods isn't ...

2008-04-16
OpenVz, /proc/user_beancounters and tcpsndbuf

If you're using OpenVz, you owe it to yourself to take a look at /proc/user_beancounters every now and again. Just today at work we were having bizarre problems with one of the containers:

Everything would seemingly work fine. Then the load would spike from 0.something to 150+ in less than a ...

2008-04-13
Rebuilding the build server on every build

At Edgeio we had a very complex software system. It was NOT a typical small little LAMP setup or little Rails setup. The web app was the simple piece. The complex pieces were things like processing 3 million+ blog feeds every days, and building a search engine and getting it ...

2008-04-12
Mini reviews of 19 Ruby template engines

I've seen lots of template systems in Ruby, but haven't been really been happy with any of them. Over the last few months or so I've kept notes of the ones I looked at. This is the list I came up with, and some comments on each. But first a disclaimer:

...

2008-04-11
Ken Livingstone and how to handle the press

No matter what you think about his politics, Ken Livingstone (the mayor of London) knows how to deal with the press. And found his response when a national newspaper apparently threatened to "expose" that he has three kids by two previous partners quite funny:

But all the people who ...

2008-04-11
- Why am I forced to optimize when choosing my language?

Martin C. Martin wrote a great post on performance and dynamic languages. I particularly loved this quote:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Why am I forced to optimize when I am choosing my language, before writing a single line of code?

The post and comments ...

2008-04-11
Dealing with information overload

I've been thinking a lot about dealing with information overload recently. WIth the ever-increasing hype for sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, neither of which I use, and a steady stream of Facebook invitations, LinkedIn requests and invites to a continuously growing set of social networking sites and bizarre ...