When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · November
· · · · 09 (2 entries)
Metered Approval · What happened was, as we were getting ready to leave the apartment in Frankfurt a bunch of comments showed up, and when I clicked “Approve” the Net had gone away for some reason and we had to leave. At the airport, I noticed they had lots of these hokey Internet-by-the-minute kiosks; I’d never used one. While writing ongoing fragments requires an intricate web of technology and a solid
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ssh connection, the comment system is pure browser-based simplicity. The kiosk interface is slick, it lets you enter a URL and doesn’t ask for money until you say ”Go“. So I slapped in a €0.20 coin and started struggling with the German keyboard, which makes the “Y” and “/” hard to find. Eventually I reached the approval page and got logged in and saw the comments again. I was about ready to hit the button when this thing popped up on the screen, “Your time is running out in 30 ... 29 ... 28 ...”, quite nerve-wracking in fact. I dove into my pocket and found another double-Euro-dime with seconds to spare, giving me time for the approval to complete and to use the “logout” button. What a weird feeling. I wonder if these things are profitable?[1 comment]
An RX for Ruby Performance · This is an insanely long and gnarly essay about implementing, then optimizing, the low-level bits of a pure-Ruby XML parser. If you obsess about XML reading, deterministic finite automata, or Ruby code optimization, you may find some part of it interesting. There may perhaps be six people in the world who care about all three; others are warned that an attempt to read this end to end may lead to general paralysis and perhaps even clinical brain-death. [He’s not kidding. -Ed.] By way of compensation, I’ve tried to be offensive wherever the opportunity presented. [Update: Outstanding comment from Avi Bryant below, which he repeats and expands here.] ...
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