Vito's journal

SOLVED: 30C temperature drop and great speed boost on Macbook Pro, after reapplying thermal paste!

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:00:00 PST

Like many other owners of a Macbook Pro laptop, I have also been struggling for a while with excessive heat issues on mine (a mid-2010 15" i5); not only was the laptop usually so hot that I almost couldn't touch it, but its performance was also badly affected due to the CPU throttling that the OS operates so to prevent damage from heat. Eventually, I decided to reapply the thermal paste to both the CPU and the GPU, with amazing results.

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Rails 3.1 and installing Ruby 1.9.2-p290 with the 'fast require' patch, readline, iconv

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 16:00:00 PDT

In case you haven't noticed, Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 are significantly slower than 1.8.7 at loading Rails 3 apps; as a result, Rails 3 apps' startup takes much longer, affecting - for example - testing. Here's a quick tip on how to patch the latest stable version of Ruby to improve startup time with Rails 3 apps.

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Rest in peace, Steve

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:00:00 PDT

A sad day for all technology enthusiasts and non.

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Syslog woes

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:00:00 PDT

If you are using (or planning to use) syslog for web apps logging, you should think twice if you care about performance. Here's why some investigation revealed that switching to syslog had killed one of our applications.

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A contact form for Jekyll, powered by Sinatra

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:00:00 PDT

Following up to the extensive guide in the previous entry, this post shows how to quickly and easily integrate a server-side contact form in a Jekyll site, powered by Sinatra.

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Migrating from Wordpress to Jekyll - Part 2: Everything you need to know about Jekyll

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 16:00:00 PDT

In this second part, I'll describe the steps I have taken to move my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll, while preserving the site's layout, structure and -more importantly- SEO characteristics. If you also aren't happy with Wordpress for a reason or another and have decided to migrate, here's all you need to know.

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Migrating from Wordpress to Jekyll - Part 1: Why I gave up on Wordpress

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 17:00:00 PDT

Wordpress is a fully featured CMS that makes a great choice for blogging. However, after just three months, I decided Wordpress wasn't for me, and started to look for alternatives that would be easier for me to manage and customise as Ruby developer. Enter Jekyll. Here, in this first part, is why I don't think I will ever want to go back to a CMS like Wordpress.

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Why isn't SSL turned on by default for all websites?

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:00:00 PST

Despite SSL encryption does help improve the security of a web application and the privacy of its users, not many websites use SSL by default, yet. Here's a look at the most likely reasons why the web hasn't yet adopted HTTPS as the default protocol.

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Thoughts on the Nokia-Microsoft deal

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:00:00 PST

A new strategic alliance between Nokia and Microsoft promises to disrupt the existing mobile ecosystems, and fight back common "enemies" such as Google and Apple with new innovative devices featuring Nokia's rock solid hardware and running Windows Phone 7. Will this partnership eventually succeed or will it result in another failed attempt for both companies?

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An up-to-date look at the state of web typography with considerations for usability, performance, SEO and security

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:00:00 PST

Over the years several techniques have been developed to address the embedding of custom fonts in web pages; here's which ones you should use, and why, with a particular attention to the implications that custom font embedding may have for your site's usability, accessibility and SEO value, as well as the impact on performance and security concerns.

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share_counts Ruby gem: The easiest way to check how many times a URL has been shared on social networks!

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

If you are building an application with social features or a content aggregator, you will find this Ruby gem very useful: it makes it super quick and easy to check at once how many times a given page has been shared on the most popular social networks; services currently supported are Reddit, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Stumble Upon, but more to come.

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Why you should think twice before using awesome_print (and similar) in production

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

We've seen in the previous posts how the awesome_print Ruby gem can be used to prettify also application logs, to make their content more readable. It may sound like a good idea, but you're warned: it can kill performance.

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A few more methods to format and beautify Ruby objects in console and logs

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

Follow up to the previous post, with a few more ways to format and beautify output in a Ruby console as well as in application logs.

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Prettier, user friendly printing of Ruby objects

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

If you, like me, don't like too much how Ruby objects usually look when displayed in a console (output on single lines, lack of indentation, and so on), it's likely you also have looked for ways to prettify this kind of output. This can be useful in a console, but also to have more user friendly, more readable debugging information in your application’s log files. Not only: as we'll see, knowing which 'printer' methods to use for each case can help display or log more complete information about...

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A workaround for ActiveRecord's partial updates not working properly with serialised columns (bug?)

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

ActiveRecord supports a feature called "partial updates" that helps reduce network traffic towards the database, improving performance in some cases, for example with models having large text or blob columns. However, it does not play well with serialised columns. Here's why, and a working fix.

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Painless, ultra fast hot backups and restores of MySQL databases with Percona's XtraBackup

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

If you work with large or replicated MySQL databases, you may already have realised that mysqldump isn't always the best tool for backing up and restoring data. Here's how to use a great FOSS alternative, Percona's XtraBackup for your backups and restores, but also for setting up replication slaves a lot more quickly.

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Smarter, faster backups and restores of MySQL databases using mysqldump - and other useful tips

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

Tired of slow backups and restores of large MySQL databases with mysqldump? Setting up a replication slave? Want to work more easily with remote MySQL instances and automate backup/restore tasks? Then you can't miss these useful tips!

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A serialisable and validatable tableless model to get rid of a few tables and speed things up

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 16:00:00 PST

I have just published a tiny gem, called tableless_model. It includes some functionality I have used quite often in my recent projects, which can help reduce database complexity, and improve performance, by replacing tables and associations with fewer tables storing serialised data instead.

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Thanks Google for being so (un)helpful

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:00:00 PST

Google is ever expanding the range of services they offer by acquiring companies at an incredible rate. But the integration between these services and the customer support, often leave a lot to be desired.

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Using Google Translate from the terminal

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 16:00:00 PST

If you happen to use Google Translate often and always have a terminal open, here's is how to easily use the API from the command line, rather than from within a browser.

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