Category Archives: Ruby

How to read one non-blocking key press in Ruby

During the development of a simple command line game in Ruby, I wanted to check if the player has pressed a given key in a non-blocking and buffered way. That is: If no key was pressed, don’t wait for one … Continue reading

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Rails cluster with Ruby load balancer using Docker

Lately I discovered Docker. I made a quick presentation on it for the rivierarb meetup of february 2014 (slides available). As an example of Docker’s usage, I decided to make something cool: a Rails cluster, with a Ruby load balancer … Continue reading

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Install Ruby 1.9.3 on a shared hosting non root

I’ve got through a bit of a hurdle to get Ruby 1.9.3 installed on my shared host. My host is PlanetHoster, but this walkthrough should work with any host giving you a decent development suite (gcc, ld, make…), like 1and1, … Continue reading

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A quick message queue benchmark: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, HornetQ, QPID, Apollo…

Lately I performed a message queue benchmark, comparing several queuing frameworks (RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ…). Those benchmarks are part of a complete study conducted by Adina Mihailescu, and everything was presented at the April 2013 riviera.rb meet-up. You should definitely peek into … Continue reading

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rb_iterate replaced by rb_block_call API between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9

You may have noticed that some Ruby libraries using C extensions were suddenly having core dumps when compiled using Ruby 1.9, whereas compiling with Ruby 1.8 got no problems. A good culprit might be the usage of rb_iterate method in … Continue reading

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Code surprise for today

A little code surprise today for all my beloved readers 🙂 You find out what it does 😉 Hint: executing it might help and is harmless Enjoy, with all my best wishes for this year! Muriel

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The Ruby C API – Basics

In my 2 previous posts, we saw how to write C extensions, and how to package them. Now time has come to see a little bit of the Ruby C API. This post will deal with the basics, next ones … Continue reading

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Packaging Ruby C extensions in nice gems

In the first part of this series on Ruby and C, we’ve seen how easy it is to write a C extension and use it in Ruby environment. However, in real world problems, a Ruby library will have several C … Continue reading

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How to write C extensions easily in Ruby

Lots of Ruby libraries suffer from performance. It is in fact one of the biggest criticism that is being made to Ruby. There are lots of ways to improve Ruby’s performance: use latest Ruby version, use JRuby, use Ruby Entreprise … Continue reading

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My daily software stack

Hi This is a recurring question: “What soft are you using for your day-to-day activities ?” First, “day-to-day activities” for me mean lots of different things as a freelancer, developer and CEO. So I will try to cope with each … Continue reading

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