extraterrestrialicious web apps

Politics this time.

The hate is back in Dutch politics. Geert ‘Blondie’ Wilders is stirring up the masses with something incomprehensible. The saddest thing is; it’s working. Let me explain.

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Believe the hype. RMagick is an evil, memory leaking package. Do not use it. I always wondered why my Mongrels were sluggish; and why they often seemed to hang.

Of course I always knew I shouldn’t have used RMagick. But it’s just too darn handy. And it could not be that bad, right? Right?

Well, it can. It really can. RMagick eats memory like crazy and does not let go. Just shifting that stuff out is like night and day. Happy Mongrels, happy proxies, a happy front end, a happy admin and most importantly happy users.

If your Ruby/Rails app is acting slow: get rid of RMagick. Really.

There’s a reason I’m reluctant use a package manager.

They can be great when they work, but when they fail you’re dead in the water. And I mean really dead. Case in point: the rubygems package manager. Great when it works! But when I was confronted with a misbehaving Ruby app, here’s what happened.

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The second installment of the utf-8 saga I started last week.

Of course, per all the advice that’s out there, I needed to
run some nasty-ass updates directly in MySQL. Buh. Even in my utf-8 Terminal.app I could not display some weirdness properly. So it came down to hex() and unhex()’ing in MySQL. Joy!

Even if it’s only for myself, here is the code that was used:

update articles set body = replace(body, unhex('C3A23F3F'), "'") where body regexp unhex('C3A2');

and let’s not forget this beauty:

update articles set body = replace(body, unhex('C3A23FC29D'), "'") where body regexp unhex('C3A2');

both of which returned various combinations of ??? â?? and Japanese characters to a simple apostrophe.

And no, the character_set_server still isn’t utf-8. Most data is fine now though.

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Recently I discovered all releases of Turn Up The Bass ever
made! How cool is that?

I remember hiring these CDs from the local video store since I couldn’t afford them. And now they’re available online, plus they fit on a DVD easily. Sweeeet.