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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Full stack integration testing with Rails3: browser-oriented, JavaScript, continuous integration
This post is a complete summary of all my efforts to have a complete and decent solution to test Rails applications. As it is a long post, here you have the table of contents: Introduction…
Using data sets in Ruby: performance of Hash vs Set
A data set is a collection of objects that ensures each object is present only once in the collection. In Ruby, there are 2 simple ways to define data sets: use the Set Ruby standard…
How to change Rake tasks’ prerequisites dynamically
Several times in my developer’s life I have found it very useful to use Dependency Graph Programming. That means mapping processes into invokable targets having dependencies on other targets that need to be invoked prior.…