Author: Paweł Gościcki

Ruby/Rails programmer.

Synecdoche, New York

Great movie and a great quote (or rather a monologue):

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for 20 years and you may never, ever trace it to its source.

And you only get one chance to play it out. And they say there is no fate, but there is, it’s what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second.

Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes, or it seems to, but it doesn’t really. So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along.

Something to make you feel connected.
Something to make you feel whole.
Something to make you feel loved.

And the truth is I feel so angry.
And the truth is I feel so fucking sad.
And the truth is, I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long.
And for just as long, I’ve been pretending I’m okay just to get along, just for…

I don’t know why. Maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody.

– Amen.

The downsides of Virtuozzo when used with mongrel

The scenario goes more or less like this. You have your Virtuozzo powered VPS. You have your RAM limit. You have your mongrels behind nginx plus mysql taking on average 60-70% of your available RAM (quite sensible limit). Now imagine the server gets hammered (not necessairly your VPS). Load goes over 10 (or even over 50). Mongrels stop responding. Queue builds up (inside mongrels), mongrels consume more and more of memory. Load still over 10. Memory limit reached. One of the mongrels is killed by Virtuozzo (too bad if it was the only one). Load still high. At some point other mongrels stop accepting new requests (queue limit reached?) and when load goes down they are unable to process the built up queue. Effect: your website is returning a 500 error code and you have to manually restart the mongrels (they are hanged up). I’ve been seeing similar behaviour too often lately…

Possible solutions: xen (does not kill your children), passenger (spawns new children whenever needed), haproxy (prolongs the life of your children), god (brings dead children back to life).

I’m going with passenger for now, thinking about moving to xen in the future.

Top 25 music of 2008

Continuing the tradition from 2007, 2006 and 2005 here is the list of 25 songs that completely blew my mind in 2008:

  1. Lil Wayne – Lollipop
  2. Jay Sean – Ride It
  3. Zeus – W dół
  4. Darin ft. Kat Deluna – Breathing Your Love
  5. Armin Van Buuren ft. Sharon Den Adel – In And Out Of Love
  6. Dash Berlin – Till The Sky Falls Down
  7. Britney Spears – Unusual You
  8. Danny ft. Therese – If Only You
  9. The Potbelleez – Don’t Hold Back
  10. Marek Roman – Piosenka o Kwiatach
  11. Justin Timberlake – Lovestoned/I Think She Knows (Tiesto Remix)
  12. Bangbros – I Engineer
  13. Simian Mobile Disco – I Believe
  14. Markoolio vs Tilde Froling – Emma Emma (Kobojsarna Remix)
  15. Arash ft. Shaggy – Donya
  16. Finger Eleven – Paralyzer
  17. Ernesto vs Bastian – Thrill
  18. Alex C. ft. Y-Ass – Du hast Den Schönsten Arsch der Welt
  19. 2 Pistols ft. Ray J – You Know Me
  20. Fabri Fibra ft. Gianna Nannini – In Italia
  21. Definition Part 2 ft. L’enfant – Hunterville
  22. Andrew Donalds – Simple Obsession
  23. Kid Cudi – Day ‘n’ Nite
  24. Nexx – Syncronize Lips
  25. Hollywood Undead – Undead

The way I look at it, it’s hip-hop (r’n’b) vs disco (house/pop/electronic) plus occasionally something else.

Rails and Merb together

Or putting it in another words: Merb will be merged into Rails to become Rails 3.0. Is it 1st April just way too soon or what? – was my first thought the moment I’ve read it on the Ezra’s blog. But then I’ve read the official announcement and… it kind of turned out to be true. Surprised I was, definitely. I haven’t really jumped on the whole Merb bandwagon. Sure, I was planning to try out Merb in the (rather distant) future. Now it seems I won’t have to. Merb supposedly did lots of things better than Rails (modularity, less dependencies, more lightweight, faster) and those things are to be incorporated into Rails. Will see how this pans out.

Exciting times. Definitely exciting. Nice Xmas gift.