Sometimes your code is using much more RAM than it should. You've made sure that you are not keeping too many large objects around, you got rid of their references and you are sure they were GCed. Yet ps is saying your code takes up too much memory. Memory fragmentation can be nasty at times, but you can avoid it by allocating carefully. Making...

I've realized that my initial performance comparisons were flawed because the index included neither the text nor the term vectors. According to Ferret's documentation, (and a basic understanding of inverted indices) term vectors are needed for creating search result excerpts and performing phrase searches. Also, since the index based on suffix...

Motivated by this performance comparison of Montezuma vs. Ferret and Lucene, I tried to see how my toyish full-text search engine based on suffix arrays fares against Ferret: If the relative performance between Ferret and Lucene shown in the Montezuma benchmark holds, my toy engine is about 2x faster than Lucene when indexing small corpora...

eigenclass.org is a bit over one year old, and I've populated it with a fair amount of information and code. If you've been reading it, you'll know that I've tried to keep eigenclass.org as far as possible from the average(?) blog ("link to news story plus worthless comment", "link to link to discussion of somebody else's work", shallow...

FastRI is an alternative to the ri command-line tool (used for browsing Ruby's stdlib and third-party API docs). It is much faster, and also allows you to offer RI lookup services over DRb. FastRI is smarter than ri, and can find classes anywhere in the hierarchy without specifying the "full path". FastRI can perform full-text searching. Its...

I'd been planning to add full-text search capabilities to FastRI from the beginning, and in Ruby-land "full-text" means Ferret. But I wanted to keep dependencies to a minimum, as FastRI could someday aspire to replace parts of the agonizing ri in the stdlib. There had to be a middle ground between risearch's simplicity and slowness and Ferret's...

FastRI is a much improved ri (the standard tool for browsing core/stdlib/third party Ruby documentation): a lot faster --- don't you hate hearing your HD moan for several seconds with plain old ri? better support for RI documentation in RubyGems packages more intelligent: configurable search strategies (case-independent, "nested exact", partial...

Yes, everybody and his dog has hacked his .irbrc in order to use RI and complete methods. You've seen it in rubygarden and then in wirble. But really, typing Object.ri "object_id" is way too much work. sheepman showed the way to combine method completion and RI, and here's my improvement on it: thanks to FastRI*1 being much faster than RI, you...

Never felt that ri is way too slow? It was never very fast, but it's become worse as of late, since it also searches the RI documentation in your RubyGems packages... eban recently proposed a shell script to cache the results: #! /bin/sh cachedir=$HOME/.fri mkdir -p $cachedir args="$@" cachename=$cachedir/"$(echo -- $args | md5sum | cut -d' '...

Want some logic programming without leaving the comfort of your irb session? I've taken the interpreter I found in a couple articles in Japanese, added syntactic sugar and some new predicates. It's quite powerful now; you can find below some logical programs, including symbolic differentiation and simplification. If you want to play along,...

A number of screencasts showcasing vim+ruby coolness are being collected at sciruby. Making your own is easy, so show the world how to save some keypresses! :) This animation demoes: the "Project" IDE/buffer explorer my Simplefold plugin taglist basic insert mode completion rcov 's compiler plugin, which finds uncovered code introduced since...

xmpfilter is a small tool that can be used to generate Test::Unit assertions and RSpec expectations semi-automatically annotate source code with intermediate results (a bit like irb --simple-prompt but only for the lines explicitly marked with # =>). Very useful for example code (such as postings to ruby-talk). As of 0.3.1, xmpfilter can...

It's been a while since the last update to my summary of changes in Ruby 1.9 and there are lots of new methods, a few syntactic changes and fundamental changes in relation between Symbols and Strings. Some highlights follow, but refer to the expanded changelog for the details (several RSS feeds with abridged ("differential") summaries are...

I want to read Ruby's sources, which order is best? I've been answering to that question a few times a year, sometimes on ruby-talk, and as of late responding to private emails. The last time I took the extra effort to draft a self-study guide to ruby's internals. Here's a reformatted version. Read more...

Are you still adding printf/puts calls and restarting your app to figure what went wrong? Sometimes, the problem is hard to reproduce, or you only discover it in production. You've got a process that exhibits the bug, but you didn't run it under ruby-debug, so there's no choice but kill it and reproduce after adding some code to inspect your...