Big Dave’s Blog

Big Dave’s Blog

  • Bletchley Park Snubbed by British Government

    UK Snubs Support for Home of WWII Enigma Here we go again. Bletchley Park continues to get little love. Here we have what is basically one on of the birthplaces of modern computing. On top of that, the group of people that worked here, along with their US partners in Building 26, did more to…

  • Workling Timing Issue

    As you probably noticed already, I use Workling a lot, and I wrote about it a few times (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). One minor gotcha to be aware of is that you need to make sure you handle it when Workling is too fast. A common use of Workling is to make a…

  • Thousand Yard Stares: Ruins and Ghosts of the Battle of Peleliu

    Thousand Yard Stares: Ruins and Ghosts of the Battle of Peleliu

    Thousand Yard Stares: Ruins and Ghosts of the Battle of Peleliu, 1944, 2008 « The Wired JesterIn reference to Memorial Day, I came across the above link. More than most battles, Peleliu is one of those that defines sacrifice. The amount of suffering and carnage endured on that small island in the Pacific is difficult…

  • Gotcha with find_each and find_in_batches

    Rails 2.3 added a couple of nice new methods – find_each and find_in_batches. Both methods accomplish the same thing in a slightly different way. Unlike a normal finder these methods grab objects in batches instead of all at once. For instance, if you have 500,000 users, you don’t want to do the following: User.find(:all).each {…

  • Why We Need Audiophiles

    Gizmodo – Why We Need Audiophiles – Audiophiles This is a great read for anyone that is interested in great sound. I’ve said it a few times, I’m not into expensive audio gear because I like gadgets (although that part is fun too). I’m into expensive gear because I flat-out love music, and I want…

  • Red Sox Opening Day 2009

    Red Sox Opening Day 2009

    What an amazing day. Yesterday, my friend Brian sends me a tweet offering a ticket for Opening Day at Fenway Park. Now, I’ve been a fan of baseball and the Red Sox since I could walk, but I’ve never had the privilege of seeing Opening Day. On top of that, after I can’t count how many Red…

  • The Perils of Testing Code

    Testing code is good, right? No! Testing code is bad. Testing functionality is good. How many of us have written a bunch of code and then turned around and wrote a bunch of tests for that code? Be honest! Everyone has done it, but why is it a bad thing? The problem with this is…

  • Replacing Mongrel with Passenger (mod_rails)

    I’ve been using Apache + Mongrel for a while now. I read about Passenger when it first came out, but I never felt the need to bother with it since I have a bunch of recipes for Apache and Mongrel (see a previous posts about background tasks with Workling). The other day, I figured I would…

  • Music Is Dead: iPods and Young People Have Utterly Destroyed Music

    Music Is Dead: iPods and Young People Have Utterly Destroyed Music This is depressing for someone like me. A Stanford professor did an informal study over several years, and he found that students each year preferred low-quality MP3 more and more. Like the author, this is disappointing for me because it most likely means it…

  • Phew! That was close!

    I’m not sure why, but I seem to be on an astronomy kick lately. I came across a little tidbit today that reminded me of Deep Impact and Armageddon. At 13:44 UT today (March 2, 2009), a 30 meter asteroid (identified as 2009 DD45) will pass by earth and miss by only 37,282 miles. Even though…