• Nov 20, 2007

  Firefox 3, Beta

  Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out! Check out the pretty sweet list of changes.

  

  
  

  If you want to try it, you'll probably want to run Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 at the same time. Only this time you should remember to rename Firefox 3 so that it doesn't override your install of Firefox 2.

  I'd blogged about some of the changes previously if you care for some screenshots of some of the new features (Mozilla Links covers a good number of new Firefox 3 changes too):

  • Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
  • supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates.
  • Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
  • Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
• Nov 15, 2007

  Best JavaScript library project roadmap I've seen

  The mootools developers look like they are having fun defining their project roadmap:

  

  
  

  MooTools Plugin to uninstall Internet Explorer from any machine within network range

• Oct 26, 2007

  New in Rails: a request profiler for profiling your app

  Jeremy Kemper (aka bitsweat) committed a very useful tool into the Rails trunk not too long ago: a request profiler! It's a human-friendly wrapper script around the ruby-prof library, a nice ruby code profiler, that lets you run multiple requests against a URI in your application and get a detailed code profile report in text and HTML.

  Wanna try it out? Update your vendor/rails to at least revision 8016, run rake rails:update to copy the new script/performance/request script into your app's script directory, install the ruby-prof gem (sudo gem install ruby-prof), then let it loose on your app.

  The options are pretty simple, just pass the script the URI you wanna profile. There're options for specifying how many requests you want to process, and for profiling POST requests, there's one for
  specifying a POST fixture file.

  USAGE: script/performance/request uri [options]
      -u, --uri [URI]                  Request URI. Defaults to http://localhost:3000/
      -n, --times [0000]               How many requests to process. Defaults to 1000.
      -b, --benchmark                  Benchmark instead of profiling
          --method [GET]               HTTP request method. Defaults to GET.
          --fixture [FILE]             Path to POST fixture file
          --open [CMD]                 Command to open profile results. Defaults to "open %s &"
      -h, --help                       Show this help

  At the end of the run, you get a text and HTML report with the methods called and the time spent in them. If you haven't seen a code profile before, it looks something like this:

  

  
  

  Very nice stuff! It's extremely convenient to have profiling like this built into Rails itself - personally I've not even run any profiling on my Rails code because it seemed like a hassle (though I do run httperf benchmarks and take note the number of requests per second). With code profiling, you can easily see which parts of your code are the bottlenecks and optimize away - it's a godsend that it's so easy to do it in Rails!

  Anyway, this is all still new stuff I imagine and subject to change (and improvements), but still very exciting for those of us who are hitting performance bottlenecks in our Rails apps (and are not already doing code profiling).

• Oct 15, 2007

  Konata Izumi in Edge Rails

  You wouldn't think that Konata Izumi (a character from the anime, Lucky Star) and Ruby on Rails (a web MVC framework) would somehow be associated, but they are!

  I took the opportunity to fill in the missing ActiveRecord::Base#to_json documentation with examples using Konata Izumi and it got committed unchanged in revision 7905. Cute. I hope no one changes them.

  Update: Managed to get more Konata Izumi documentation into Rails ;)

• Oct 15, 2007

  Harajuku Crepe arrives in Singapore

  One of my favorite foodie moments from my trip to Tokyo was at Harajuku where I had a crepe with cheese cake and ice cream from Angel's Heart (need to dig that photo out). It was THE best crepe I've ever had. I'd even thrown around the idea of bringing it back to Singapore as a commercial venture.

  Well anyway, I found that one of the crepe shops in Harajuku, Marion Cafe, that was just opposite Angel's Heart, has opened a branch right here in Singapore at the IMM Building.

  

  
  

  I tried their mango crepe (it had mango and ice cream in it) which set us back about SGD 5.80.

  

  
  

  It was alright, not as good as the one I had in Harajuku of course, but still a nice treat. They have 105 different types of crepe - anything ranging for your run-of-the-mill strawberry and ice cream crepe, to tuna crepe, and even crepe with Japanese curry.

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