My beagleboard-xM wifi router is almost a year old; old enough to take on more responsibilities. Most recently it became the new home for my installation of tracker, which I migrated from a publicly accessible linode server. Soon I’ll be giving it the task of acting as an iTunes server.
After using tracker in it’s new home for a few months, I realized that disk operations on the beagleboard were quite a bottleneck.
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Great video. Blows my mind that string concatenation + eval is faster than object/hash creation + repeated modification.
Now I see why. I’ve run an experiment here.
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Wherein I recap the things I’ve done and learned this year as a software developer (mainly at work). I’ve fixed many bugs and uttered many curses. Through it all I’ve constantly strived to make the code a better place.
Amazon Web Services
Video encoding instances Launch/Start when there’s a backlog, and Stop/Terminate when there’s not. Said goodbye to Amazon SQS for job queues, and hello to Redis. Hello consistency and speed.
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Got to use node.js for a work project recently. We needed an FTP server with special user authentication that would run custom code after a file was uploaded. There was one node.js FTP server implementation on github, so I forked it and started rounding out the basic functionality. My fork is here.
The first significant change I made was to encapsulate the data connection logic. File lists and file contents are transferred over the data connection (FTP commands and responses over the control connection).
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Moved away from storing individual string values to storing whole objects/documents in redis hashes. Hashes make more sense when you need to store a group of data values like a blog post.
But I’m not making a blog. My task it to create an updated version of my personal journal and information storage system. Daily I use it to log my thoughts, to stage blog posts (like this one), keep track of links to check later (which often doesn’t happen), keep todo lists for projects, and other things.
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In my quest to learn new things, specifically the following things, I’ve been both excited and drained:
node.js Redis document database haml sass a micro-framework By “new things” I really mean “some cutting edge stuff that seems pretty cool”, the “cutting edge” portion being the source of most of my struggle. New tools, languages and software have sharp edges.
Since I love fast and light software, node.js is my current casual focus.
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A month ago I got excited about node.js. Watched two presentations, installed it, ran a few tests, and then ran out of steam for lack of a real project idea. Hate when that happens.
At the same time I also got excited about learning advanced Javascript concepts since it would no doubt help me with node.js, so I decided to investigate jQuery and see what makes it tick. And what better way to really investigate jQuery than to try to build something similar on my own?
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