Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9 group_by performance

I am working on a ruby project which has cpu intensive tasks so I wanted to see what the impact would be of using the ruby 1.9 development version. It is supposed to provide a major performance increase.

The task used in this project crunches a large amount of data using mathematical functions, array sorting/grouping and database writes.

Ruby versions used for this test:

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i686-darwin8.10.1]
ruby 1.9.0 (2008-07-25 revision 18217) [i686-darwin9]

A typical run would take 240sec using ruby 1.8 and 205s with ruby 1.9 without any adaptations: A ~15% speed increase!

I dug a little deeper and found that the array.group_by method was performing a lot faster in ruby 1.9 so i wrote this benchmark to test the increase.

Continue reading ‘Ruby 1.8 vs 1.9 group_by performance’

Pictures from Canada

I uploaded most of my picture’s from our vacation in Canada.
As always, you can find them here.

Our trip started in Vancouver on July 4th. We visited Vicatoria, Tofino, Whistler, Clearwater, Jasper, Banff and Canmore. Tomorrow we’re going to Calgary for 2 days before we take a plane back home to Belgium (if Belgium will still be one country that is).

After a long climb

Nice view on Canmore after a 2h climb

Six word stories

Wired magazine asked 33 writers and 5 designers to write 6-word science fiction stories. (The idea came from Hemmingway)

I laughed so hard with this one:

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Read the others here.

Freelance cartoons

The cartoons of N.C. Winters about freelancers are hilarious!


happens to me all the time.

More available here

Using net/pop in Ruby with ssl.

If you follow this blog post by Chris Roos for connecting to Gmail’s pop server with Ruby and encounter an error similar to this one: NoMethodError: undefined method `set_params’ for #<OpenSSL::SSL::SSLContext:0×50fc58>

Here’s the fix: You need an older version of Ruby 1.9’s net/pop library. I found that the latest one working was revision 13778. view it here.

Hope this saves some time for a few people.

2 years What’s Cookin’?

Last Saturday we had our 2 year anniversary party with 1200 Warriors: Junior and Choco, 2 super friendly New Yorkers who never played in Europe before. Man, they sure know how to entertain a room full party people!

Our camera friend made a nice babbelbox movie which summarizes what people think about What’s Cookin’ :-)

I had a really really great time. Normally I have a lot of work during my own parties, but this time we found enough people to work for us.

Clair, Daphne, Anne and Rebecca from erasmus in Lisbon were here too, that made it even more special!
Thanks guys!

And thanks to everybody who was there to party!

Quote from Junior & Choco after the Party:

We wish we were still there !!!!!! Thanks for bringing us out and having a blast
Much love to everyone in Ghent
See you soon
1200 Warriors

:-)

What’s Cookin’ movie

Time to breath new life in this blog :-)

Here is a short movie clip from our last What’s Cookin’ party on 1st of February in the Vooruit in Ghent.

The place was packed. Great party. I hope to see more of you guys at our next edition on 3 May!