Recently, I was writing some simple statistical calculation software running tests on small data sets with a floating sample “window” through the data. Basically, this becomes a O(n^2) over Mann-Whitney U. It was fast enough for small data sets — that is until I was asked to scale the data size by about an order of magnitude.
What to do? We had plenty of hardware and I was developing on a quad-core Xeon (!!!) so why not throw more hardware at it. I was only using one core. So how do I get to the other three? Enter Rinda — a Ruby implementation of Linda.Entries from February 2008 ↓
Rinda or “Hardware is Cheap So Let’s Use More of it!”
February 25th, 2008 — Ruby
MediaWiki Film lookup gem
February 9th, 2008 — Ruby
After far too much goofing off, I’ve finally gotten off of my tuckus (metaphorically only 
) in order to write some code. In a few short hours of work, I’ve almost finished a first pass at my Wikipedia film gem. It’s sole purpose is to help me automate the download of movie synopses and posters for movies stored on iTunes for display on our AppleTV.
I’d left this project fallow for at least a half a year now. It was amusing to return to it later, with far better Ruby chops, and get it working. Now that the unit tests pass and the movie lookup driver seems to handle the majority of the bizarre errors that can occur as a result of the imperfect taxonomy used by Wikipedia, I’ll probably post a link in the next few days.
