The Music

Here’s some examples of the “apps” making up this suspiciously high number:

Japanese Photobooks (this single company has hundreds of “apps” – nothing but picture viewers with embedded pictures)

Romance novels (little better than the above – again, this company has almost a thousand “apps” just by itself)

Go to the “books” category of the App store. There’s 20 per page, and as I write this, there’s 871 pages. That’s over 17,000 “apps” which do nothing but package one or more books. They are technically applications, sure. But on a desktop PC they would be nothing more than jpeg files, PDFs, or – even better – simply web pages.

Why all these useless apps cluttering up the store? I believe it has to do with the iPhone’s lack of a user-accessible filesystem. There’s no way for a user to, say, save a PDF of a book (or 100 books) he wants to look at on the device, and then use one app to read them all. Instead, users are reduced to the highly inefficient workaround of simply saving one app per item of content they wish to access.

So, just a couple of examples above and I’ve already cut close to 20,000 “content-only apps” off the claimed 140,000. But there’s many, many more. Have a look in “music” – plenty of filler in there too. Check out “Justin Timberlake lyrics” – the app. That developer has spammed the store with over 120 nonsense apps just like that, mostly over the course of one or two days.

Check out “reference”. Thousands more there.

The fact that you need to make and release an application to load content of any kind onto your iPhone is not a strength of the platform, it’s a weakness, IMO.

http://rabbit.eng.miami.edu/students/epeng/kawaii/kitsune/index.html

I love that little fox! Since there are 12 panels, and kitsune-san sleeps for only 2 of them, we can deduce that he sleeps for only 4 hours per day.

1. Hydian Way 72.6M
2. See You 70.3M

I don’t think they reach quite the heights of 2005 but it’s still a good concert and they’re good singers. I’m just happy that someone is still making this kind of music and giving this kind of performance.

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before, and it deserves to be better known.

Aren’t we all supposed to be living in fucking space by now? My god damn cyborg body better be on track for 2029. I am counting on that god damn body.

This thing is a fucking monster. The screen is huge – you don’t realise how big it is sitting in the shop, because all the other screens there kind of desensitise you, but when you get it home you realise how god damn huge it is. It’s almost TOO big. And it was an utter bitch to carry home.

The performance is just wonderful. I’ve become more and more frustrated with my Core 2 Duo laptop – it just seems laboured and out of breath and spins its fans up at the slightest load. That machine just seems sluggish to me these days and this was becoming a hindrance in my work – I am *often* waiting for the machine to restart a server, switch apps, whatever – it’s just slow all round.

The new machine is a whole lot faster – a rough factor of 4. It’s got 4GB of memory, soon to be 8, and can take up to 16, which should do for now. It’s got 4 slots, so I can use cheap 2GB modules – the upgrade to 8GB will cost $142.

Basically I’m totally delighted. Apple really nailed it with this machine. The thing is almost too good, since there seems to be little point getting a Pro when you can have this much capacity and performance for such a low price. Check out this review; I agree with everything that guy says.

Under Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1, you can reliably expect the memory usage of this app to grow .. and grow .. and grow. I have seen it reach 900M before I shut it down (manually on development machine – in production monit would have killed and restarted it long ago).

Memory usage under 1.9.2pre1? 72.7M and it’s been running for hours. It got as high as ~130M or so at one point, but then – astonishingly – GC actually worked and released unused memory. Will wonders ever cease?

Performance is up around 20% on 1.9.1, too.

Memory usage, and the constant leaking/growth thereof, is my number one daily problem with Ruby. The preview release of 1.9.2 seems to have solved it. To say I’m happy about this development would be an understatement. I am looking forward to deploying on 1.9.2 ASAFP and will do so, probably, upon the release of preview 2 (I have noticed no stability problems whatsoever).

update: 12 hours later it’s gone down to 65.5M. Praise the Ruby Gods!

They used it to make a URL shortener – the shortest URLs possible, basically, unless a 1-character TLD is commissioned (no technical reason why not).

I can’t standa URL shorteners but couldn’t resist http://to./.ot//:ptth, which actually worked a grand total of once before not working any more for some reason. Oh well.

So, dear reader, was there a good album released in 2009? To be honest, my favourite for the year so far is “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” by Mika. It pains me to call such mainstream sugar-pop the album of the year but where’s the alternative?

If you would like to start testing Rails on 1.9, you’ll need to apply the patches listed at this Lighthouse ticket, which fix the two most serious problems. A kind user down the bottom of that ticket has pulled the patches into monkeypatches suitable for just slipping into your config/initializers folder – I can confirm that they work for me.

I cannot fathom Rails Core’s bizarre refusal to pull these patches into 2.3.5. Yet another release goes out that is completely non-functional on the newest, fastest and best version of the language, forcing users to seek out and apply non-official monkeypatches – or just forsake 1.9 altogether, as the vast majority seem to be doing. In what way is this in the best interest of the framework or the community? What is holding them back? The patches might not be 100% perfect but they’re a lot better than what we have now, which is that out of the box Rails is broken on 1.9.1.

UPDATE: Happily, the 1.9.1-patched Rails does seem to be working on 1.9.2 as well. I’ve installed ruby 1.9.2dev (2009-09-07 trunk 24787) and my favourite “fussy site” is working there, too. That’s great news, because 1.9.2 is going to be the “serious” version of Ruby 1.9 and has further big performance increases.

I’d been planning to get the i5, but after seeing this report I think I’ll plump for the i7. It’s on sale today for AUD$2,758.01 (don’t forget the 1c).

I am pretty dispassionate about which species is involved when it comes to ending life – the main factor is the intelligence and self-awareness of the victim. There are plenty of animals that are demonstrably self-aware, so in my view, it’s ethically worse to kill, say, an adult dog, than to perform an abortion. Or a dolphin, for that matter – or a pig, or an ape, or any other animal with clear signs of intelligence.

Glad to see more expert support that we should be taking the rights of animals more seriously. We are animals, after all, no matter what superstitionists insist, and by killing any other animal, we’re killing our own. Better have good reason.

And so imagine my delight today, when the first alpha release is finally available! Sure, it’s only an alpha release, so it’s not going to be quite as good as the final product – but surely it will live up to the claims in the RailsConf 2008 demonstration? I mean, it was that good even then! Surely it must be even better now!

Anyway, I obviously had to install it and put these claims to the test.

I followed the instructions on this page – with a couple of changes, such as that I use .profile instead of .bashrc.

I decided to test with as close to a real world library as I could. That post mentions that Maglev supports Sinatra, so I thought that would be an ideal test. Then again, it also says it supports RubyGems but I couldn’t get that to work at all. C extensions are out too, so we’ll be using Webrick.

To get around the RubyGems problem, I manually downloaded Rack and Sinatra and placed the contents of their lib directories into a single folder. I then created a trivial sinatra app as shown:

require File.expand_path(::File.dirname(__FILE__)) + '/sinatra.rb'
require File.expand_path(::File.dirname(__FILE__)) + '/rack.rb'
 
get '/' do
  "Maglev Rocks!"
end

I decided to run good old ab against it. My exact command was:

ab -kc 10 -t 10 http://127.0.0.1:4567/

Because I have other servers installed in Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1, I forced sinatra to serve using webrick as follows:

ruby1.9 testmaglev.rb -s webrick

Considering the past hype of order-of-magnitude speed hikes, I was ready to be blown away. Are you ready to be blown away? Oh yeah baby, 50 times faster comin’ right up!

RESULTS

Ruby 1.8.7: Requests per second: 131.38 [#/sec] (mean)
Ruby 1.9.1: Requests per second: 144.77 [#/sec] (mean)
Maglev: Requests per second: 97.78 [#/sec] (mean)

Well golly gosh. Look at that. It’s not faster after all – in fact it’s climbing the same steep performance hill ever other interpreter has had to climb, Smalltalk magic notwithstanding. How about that.

I said the benchmarks shown at RailsConf were bullshit and would not even remotely reflect the real world performance of the final product. I said that until the interpreter implemented all of ruby, it was not ruby, and it was worthless to measure its performance. I poured skepticism upon the notion that a new interpreter, just by dint of some doubtfully superior Smalltalk heritage, could leapfrog all previous contenders with a two-order-of-magnitude performance boost.

Looks like I was right. But don’t take my word for it, run the tests yourself. I will be accepting contrite apologies in comments …

# Allow the metal piece to run in isolation
require(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../config/environment") unless defined?(Rails)
class ImageShow
 
  def self.call(env) 
    request = Rack::Request.new(env)
    if request.path_info =~ /^\/show_image\/(.+)$/
      if GridFS::GridStore.exist?(Media.database, $1)
        GridFS::GridStore.open(Media.database, $1, 'r') do |file|
          [200, {'Content-Type' => file.content_type}, [file.read]]
        end
      else
        [404, {'Content-Type' => 'text/plain'}, ['File not found.']]
      end
    else
      [404, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, ["Not Found"]]
    end
 end
 
end

That will need to be saved as image_show.rb. Slow .. but not as slow as doing it through a Rails controller.