Sam Soffes

Update: You can see the latest benchmarks at https://github.com/soffes/json-benchmarks. The results change quite a bit, so I'd recommend just running the code and seeing who wins.

I wrote a post awhile ago about JSON benchmarks. I was telling a friend he should use JSON Framework based on my old benchmark post. He asked if I had run them again recently, so I figured I'd run them again.

I updated my test app and added a new library called YAJL based on a C library. My results were very similar to before. This time I tested it on an iPad and iPod Touch.

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Here are two talks from RailsConf 2010. You can see all of the keynotes on YouTube. I haven't ever gone to a RailsConf, but I hope to sometime.

Even if you aren't a developer, these videos are totally worth your time.

This is a short 26 minute talk by Yehuda Katz (@wycats) on development in general. This is so inspiring. He talks about doing the impossible and just getting stuff done. Really worth your time.

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I arrived in San Francisco a couple of hours ago. This week is going to be awesome. I am really looking forward to WWDC 2010!

I've been telling a few people what I think Jobs is going to announce tomorrow at the keynote. I figured it would be good to post it so I can brag about how right I was. (Just joking. I'm not really that arrogant.)

There will be a new iPhone. All of the crazy rumors, phones left in bars, and cops raiding apartments aside, historically Apple has always announced a new one every year since it was released at WWDC.

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I've found myself setting up lots of servers over at RackSpace Cloud lately. It seemed look a good idea to automate everything instead of leaving it up to myself to remember everything you have to do each time.

I wrote this little shell script to make life easier. It installs everything I need to run a Ruby on Rails app in a matter of minutes. It's designed to work with Cent OS 5.4+. Here's the script's main tasks:

• Install Git 1.7.1.1
• Install Ruby 1.8.7p299
• Install RubyGems 1.3.7
• Install Passenger 2.2.15
• Install Nginx 0.8.45 (with Passenger and SSL modules)
• Install Postgres 8.4.4
• Initialize Postgres
• Install ImageMagick 6.6.3-0
• Install Bundler (latest)
• Open port 80 in iptables
• Open port 443 in iptables
• Start Nginx
• Start Postgres

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I recently added an albums I've been enjoying this week section to my homepage. It's still a major work in progress. For some reason, tons of people have commented about it on Twitter asking how I made it, so I thought I'd write a quick post about the tech behind it.

The first thing your probably noticed is the sexy vinyl look. I got this from Komodo Media (all of their stuff is awesome, you should check it out). Some simple CSS plus their images and it looks dang sexy.

I'm using the Last.fm API to get my listening history. The call to get your top albums for the week doesn't return the album art for that album, so I have to get all of the albums and then get the art for each one. This whole process is pretty slow (source here) so I shove it in memcached on Heroku using the memcached gem so rendering is fast on my homepage.

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