Performance is one of the most important, yet often overlooked, aspects of programming. It’s usually not something you worry about until it gets really bad. And at that point, you have layers of code you need to sift through to figure out where you can remove bottlenecks. It’s also tricky, especially on complex, process orientated systems, to aggregate performance information for analysis. That’s where this gist for a utility performance tracer class comes into play. It’s meant to hook into Enterprise Library Logging Block by aggregating the elapsed time or information statements and pass them to the Event Log (or other listeners you’ve hooked up). Even though the gist is designed for the Enterprise Library, it can easily be modified for other utilities like Log4Net. Below is an example of how the entry looks in the EventLog. Read More
Archive for the 'Programming' Category
I was playing around with the Flickr API recently and got a little stuck: when using jQuery to call the Flickr public feed using jQuery’s $.getJSON method, I wasn’t getting any results. I thought maybe I was parsing the response incorrectly, but when I went to check out the data coming back in firebug, nothing was there. I couldn’t believe it- the response headers were present, but the body was blank. Calling the public feed url from the browser worked fine. What’s more interesting was everything worked in IE. So I did some experimenting and learned the issue: I wasn’t correctly using the endpoint to work with JSONP, which is required when using jQuery with Flickr. Then I thought I better learn more about JSONP.
I’m a big fan of Gmail’s archive feature- I can move items out of the inbox quickly and find them later with search. To mimic this behavior at work with outlook, I’ve created this quick and dirty macro which does the job. Simply create a folder named “archive” in your mailbox. When you run the macro, it will move the current item in your inbox to that folder. I’ve created a keystroke which lets me run the macro easily.
I’ve been unhappy with my current hosting provider and in looking for an alternative I tried Rackspace Cloud Server. I’ve wanted a dedicated server for a while, but it’s been cost prohibitive compared to shared machine hosting. This blog, as well as some other, smaller sites, are now running on a Rackspace Cloud Server. Needless to say I love it. Rackspace Cloud Server is simply awesome.
In my never ending love/hate relationship with Ruby, Rails and my Mac I’ve finally gotten Ruby 1.9 up and running with Rails 2.3 and MySql 64 bit. All on Snow Leopard. There was an even a little detour with Readline. If you’ve scoured other posts about Snow Leopard, Ruby, Rails and Mysql and ended up here I feel your pain. I hope this helps you on your way. Most of this info is from other places which I’ve explained in a little (just a little) but more depth. Read More
