bitfission

With the recent release of Merb 0.5, I’ve decided to use it along with datamapper for one of my new projects. It isn’t different enough to be completely foreign, but enough to be a refreshing change. I haven’t done a whole lot with either yet, but I have had a patch accepted, ran into a huge, annoying problem with autotest, and found out how to watch the SQL datamaper is generating.

stats patch

While I was in #merb earlier today, hassox posted some current benchmarks. Being somewhat a stickler for statistics, I had to point out that means alone were meaningless. Not to get into all of the boring details, two distributions can have the same mean, but be completely different. Here is an image I made in Mathematica and sktich to show why:

They all have the same mean, but a random pick from the distribution with the smaller variance of 0.5 is more likely to be actually be near the mean than with either of the ones with higher variances. If you apply this to load times, two severs could serve pages just as quickly on average. However, the one with the higher variance is going to seem a lot slower, since there are more slow points in the set.

I submitted a patch to add the standard deviations to each of the tests and clean up the output a bit.

After posting about setting up a new mac, I started to put all the other things I found myself missing on a new install. Aside from the standard adium, quicksilver, colloquy, and others there are a few things that are good enough to share.

Blurminal

I’m a long time user of iTerm but I’ve decided to give leopard’s new tabbed terminal a chance. The one big frustrating thing is it lacks iTerm’s ability to switch between tabs with command+arrow keys. However, a big plus is Ciaràin Walsh’s Blurminal. Instead of just having a percentage of transparency, it slightly blurs whatever is behind the terminal. Here’s an example:

I just got my replacement iMac (the speakers were shot on the first one) and was going about getting my development environment back together. While trying to instal datamapper, it choked on the json gem.

ruby extconf.rb install json
can't find header files for ruby.

As it turns out, the solution is very simple. I didn’t have Xcode tools from the install disc on there yet. Since it’s something you just put on once then forget about, it took me a while to realize what was going on. Hopefully this post helps others figure it out quicker than I did if they stumble across it.

Also remember to update RubyGems. Leopard comes with 0.9.4 and we’re up to 1.0.1 right now.

 sudo gem update --system